Kayla's Blog

Stonehill Cape Week and Commencement 2010

2010-05-29T18:52:00.000-07:00

I'm a Stonehill alum! Yayyy! Can you believe it?! It is still impossible for me to fathom that I am no longer a college student, but now an adult embarking on my life as a professional in the work force. The past two weeks have been busy, exciting, and fun, and have marked a momentous change in my life.

Two Thursdays ago I submitted my final two papers and thus completed my finals for the semester as well as my last assignments ever at Stonehill. Without much of a break, I started packing up the things in my dorm room. The next day, my dad and my sister came to pick up and bring home many of the things from my room, and then I left with my suite-mates to go to the Cape for one of Stonehill's many traditions, Cape Week. For Cape Week, the week between finals and commencement, members of the graduating class rent houses on the Cape, usually around Dennis (we stayed in Dennisport). During the week, the College hosts the Senior Formal. In addition to attending the formal, my friends and I spent the week on the beach, going out for ice cream (I got ice cream three times!), shopping in Chatham and Mashpee, and attending some of the Stonehill nights at local bars hosted by Stonehill students. I had a great time enjoying life as a college student with my friends for one last week. Here's a re-cap of the week in pictures:

Before the Senior Formal in Hyannis, a bunch of my friends gathered for pictures on the beach in Dennisport.

My boyfriend, Brandon, even came down to visit to attend the formal with me.

Here I am with Kathleen, Katrina, and Kait.

And of course a roommate picture of me and Carrie!

Melissa and I on the beach in Dennisport.

The girls at Tommy Doyle's in Hyannis.

In Chatham, by the lighthouse, with Kari-Ann and Carrie.

While getting ice cream at Sundae School, we noticed that Stonehill was represented, and of course we needed to take a picture!

Stonehill's Class of 2010 all came back to campus Friday for Commencement Weekend. On Friday afternoon, I attended the Legacy Campaign champagne toast (complete with some of my favorite Sodexho appetizers) to thank those who donated to the Class of 2010 class gift. Following the toast was the barbecue hosted by the Alumni Office. At the barbecue, we also got to watch a video of pictures submitted by seniors and we received our Kiss a Senior Goodbye goody bags, which are full of candy and notes sent to us from family and friends.

On Saturday, we had our graduation rehearsal and the President's Address, and then Baccalaureate in the Sports Complex followed by the Senior/Parent Dinner Dance in Boston. At the end of the Baccalaureate mass, I received my honors medallion for completing the requirements of the Honors Program and graduating with honors. The Senior/Parent Commencement Eve Dinner Dance was then a way to celebrate my graduation not just with my Stonehill friends, but with my family as well. My parents got to meet my friends' parents, who they have not met before, and some Stonehill staff as well. Here are some pictures of Baccalaureate and the Dinner Dance:

Congratulating the recipients of the Honors medallion at the close of the Baccalaureate mass.

With my parents after Baccalaureate.

Most of the graduating seniors who have also been Peer Mentors during our time at Stonehill with our boss, Jim Hermelbracht, the Director of Student Activities.

Finally, after an exhausting week of finals and a week on the Cape, Commencement Day was here! After putting on my cap and gown, the graduates all met behind Donahue Hall to line up before the traditional procession down the steps of Donahue hill. The commencement ceremony was lovely. The major themes that we heard from our commencement speaker Jack Connors, who is the President of the major Boston advertising firm HillHoliday, our student speaker John Hanawalt, and President Cregan were friendship, communication, family, faith, and that we can make a difference when we use our "many minds" and passions to work together to solve the problems our world faces. I enjoyed the ceremony, and it seemed to go by just too quickly! But I do have some great photos from during commencement and after with family and friends!

With Katrina, Kathleen, and Emma behind Donahue before Commencement.

Now with Kait and Sarah.

With my parents and my sister Lindsay after Commencement.

My grandmothers also attended Commencement and really enjoyed the day!

I also got to see some friends after the ceremony. Here I am with Alexia, Melissa, Alex, and Carrie - four of my suite-mates.

Now that I have moved back home, I have already begun work substituting in my hometown, Northbridge, MA, and in the town that my parents are from, Grafton, MA. Also, I will be working this summer as a teacher for the summer school program in Grafton. I am still in the job search process for teaching positions for next year. I am quickly learning that this process will test my patience and my nerves, but I am also so anxious and excited to find a position and get my classroom set up and begun! It is a nerve-wracking time in my life, but it is also a very exciting and thrilling time. There are many changes that will be coming in the next few years, I am sure, and I can't wait to see what the future holds for me! I will miss Stonehill immensely, but I will always have the best memories of my college years, and Stonehill has prepared me well to take on the next phase in my life, wherever it may lead me.

5 Finals Away from a Bachelor's Degree!

2010-05-07T09:49:00.000-07:00

All day yesterday I was in disbelief that it was my last day of classes that I will ever take at Stonehill. It was an exciting moment, but also unbelievable and bittersweet! Yet, it was not just yesterday, but all week that had me thinking about some of my "lasts" at Stonehill. I ate at the Hill for the last time (because they are starting remodeling today! So sad I am going to miss out on the new space!), I had Pastabilities (probably my favorite meal in the Dining Commons) for the last time, and I went to my last Brother Mike's bar night. I almost didn't go to Brother Mike's last night because I was gone all afternoon and have so much work to do for finals. But it was my last chance to go, all my friends were there, and I want to remember to enjoy the last few days in addition to getting my finals completed!

Yesterday was a busy day, not just because it has been my busiest day of classes this semester, but because for my last class, which was my senior Capstone Seminar for my English major, my class met my Professor at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and then went over my Professor's house for dinner - homemade salad and chocolate cake along with pizza. It was very generous and kind of our Professor to open her home to us. I felt I got very close with my seminar class this semester, and so our final class was an apt conclusion to our work together. It was also fun meeting her 2 and a half year old son! While we ate, we also discussed our final paper topics. But not only did my Professor want to hear from us about our final papers, she was also interested in hearing from the 11 of us about our plans for next year. As I sat in Professor Gracombe's Brookline living room listening to my classmates share their future plans, I had a strange sense that I was no longer an undergraduate. At that moment, at the end of my last day of classes, I truly felt the transition I will be making this summer from student to teacher. It was a satisfying moment and a lovely way to spend my last Stonehill class.

Here is a picture of my seminar class with Professor Gracombe:

This whole week of lasts was preceded by a first. The week began Saturday night with a Class of 2010 boat cruise on the Boston harbor on the Spirit of Boston. The event marked our "25 Days" to graduation. It was beautiful weather, and we all had a great time celebrating our next step closer to graduation. Here are a couple pictures from 25 Days:

Carrie and I before our trip to the city!

The beautiful Boston skyline, unfortunately it's a little blurry, but this was the best I could do from a moving boat!.

Kait and I on the Spirit of Boston!

Over the course of the next week, I have 3 final papers and 2 final exams, plus an interview in my hometown for a first grade teaching position. It will be a busy week, but once the week is over, I will be spending the next week on the Cape with the Class of 2010 complete with a Senior Formal, beach, and bar nights, before we come back to campus for Baccalaureate, the Senior/Parent Dinner Dance, and commencement! I am looking forward to enjoying my last week as a Stonehill student. I'll be sure to update one more time after commencement to share the highlights of our senior week!

Rain Won't Ruin Our Parade!

2010-04-19T11:01:00.000-07:00

Last I heard, the count is at 35 days until graduation! And with the approaching end of the spring semester also comes lots of exciting senior and campus events.

Last weekend, the Class of 2010 celebrated with our 50 Days event at Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots and the New England Revolution. I've been to the stadium a couple times before, but it was neat to have the clubhouse (and the stadium!) all to ourselves to eat, drink, be merry, and of course DANCE the night away! Unfortunately, it was pouring when we left campus on about 7 or 8 buses to travel to Gillette, so we all got a little wet as we mad a mad dash to get on the buses as soon as they arrived. But luckily, the event was inside, so there was no way the rain was going to bother us! I had a really great time at the event. My friends and I had fun taking pictures outside at the clubhouse level overlooking the field and around the clubhouse:

Gillette Stadium even had personalized messages to us on the jumbo-trons:

I had such a great time that I am now really looking forward to 25 Days and all the good times ahead of us during Senior Week on the Cape leading up to graduation!

This past weekend was Spring Weekend, but sadly, it didn't feel like spring at all! For the past three years we have had absolutely beautiful weather! But this year it was rainy and chilly the whole weekend! But even though it didn't feel like spring, it was still a really great weekend! Student Activities put on some great events all week leading up to the weekend, including a performance by comedian Loni Love, an A Capella Jam, and the annual DiverCity event. Then over the weekend, State Radio and GirlTalk performed our large spring concert, we had a carnival (yes, even though it rained!), and the Spring Fling Dance. All of these events are held in the Sports Complex because they are so widely attended that we couldn't have fit anywhere else! The carnival is usually held outside, but we are lucky to have a rain location in the Sports Complex!

As always, we had to take many suite-mates pictures! This one was taken before heading over to the concert on Friday night!

Here's one of GirlTalk on stage with Stonehill students dancing to his mash-ups.

GirlTalk brought confetti filled balloons as well as lots more confetti and toilet paper shooters! He was a great entertainer, and we all had a great time dancing!

Kait, myself, and Carrie at the concert! :)

Kait and Carrie posed for me at the carnival. There was fried dough, cotton candy, mini golf, lots of games, a place to take a picture for a keychain, spin art for Frisbees and sunglasses, airbrush tattoos, henna tattoos, and a BBQ lunch was also provided!

Saturday also happened to be Kait's 1st anniversary of her 21st birthday, so a few of us went out for a nice dinner at a place called Loco for tapas (Spanish appetizers) and homemade sangria.

Group picture before the Spring Fling Dance.

Of course we had to take a roommate picture showing off our outfits!

Me with Brooke and Kait at the dance!

This weekend was a lot of fun, but now it is back to the real world with a very busy week! Today I met with a focus group to discuss student leadership on campus and potential changes to leadership, and also my professor about some math challenges my group was having some trouble figuring out. Tomorrow I am giving a tour (so I maybe I will see some of you many high school students visiting colleges on your April vacation!). On Wednesday, I am visiting a solar field in Brockton to learn more about solar power to put a proposal together about investing in solar power at Stonehill. I am also announcing the names of the inductees to Kappa Delta Pi, the international education honors society, at one of Stonehill's many events celebrating academic achievement. Wednesday is actually a day off from classes for us in order for students to make presentations all around campus displaying their research and other projects, such as senior capstones.

This week is also Environmental Sustainability Week at Stonehill in honor of Earth Day, and so on Thursday, I will be with my Environmental Science class helping out at the fair. My Environmental Science class, in fact, I actually have a picture of! We have been going outside the past couple weeks for class to study the land that Stonehill is founded on. This past Thursday, Professor Emeritus Chet Raymo, the author of several fiction and non-fiction books, took a walk with us through Easton's sheep pasture to share some of his knowledge about the land with us. Here is a picture of my class with Professor Mooney from the walk:

Now back to this week! On Friday I will be attending a job fair in Boston for teaching positions, and then on Saturday, my parents will be visiting campus for the Student Life Awards event. Now add to this all the reading, papers, final projects, and exams that the last few weeks of classes will bring! It is sure to be a very busy, but also exciting few weeks ahead!

New Experiences and Big Changes

2010-04-08T19:56:00.000-07:00

Hello there! Apologies to my readers that it has been awhile, but life as a senior in the spring is quite a busy time!

As this is the last chance for me to enjoy Stonehill and enjoy time with my college friends, I have been trying to do just that! Whether my friends and I are going off campus for Indian food, grabbing a meal together, or hanging out at Brother Mike's and playing Stump Trivia, we are trying to stay in touch and keep each other caught up with all of the exciting things happening in our lives! We still have about 5 weeks left to continue to enjoy Stonehill and some really big events to look forward to, but many things we have already done for the last time. One of the most exciting things that I've done for the last time was enjoy my last spring break. This may have been my last spring break, but it was actually the first spring break that during which I traveled! I went with my boyfriend to southern California for the week to visit Brandon's sister, Megan. We had a great week, and saw so many things! We explored Pasadena (Brandon's sister is working on her Ph.D. in cell biology at CalTech and lives in Pasadena), saw the sights in LA, traveled down to San Diego, and also up to Santa Barbara. For my first time in Cali and seeing the Pacific Ocean, I sure saw a LOT of SoCal! Here are some highlights of the week in pictures:

Brandon and I in the gardens at the Getty Center near Beverly Hills.

Meg and I at the Getty Center with a great view of LA!

It's official, we're in LA!

Old Town in San Diego. Where we got yummy Mexican food for lunch!

San Diego Zoo's famous pandas!

Brandon and I at the San Diego Zoo!

Santa Monica beach and pier!

Hermosa Beach + the Pacific Ocean!

Walking along the beach in Santa Barbara.

Watching the sun set in Malibu.

The Lily-Pad Pond in the Huntington Gardens in Pasadena.

The Japanese Garden in the Huntington Gardens.

Life as a college student is really a balancing act, and it's a skill I am still perfecting! Not only am I trying to enjoy college, but I am also keeping up with schoolwork, staying involved in all my varied co-curricular programs, and oh yeah, I'm also working on planning for life after graduation as I search and apply for teaching jobs! I have been having flash-backs to my senior year of high school and the process of applying for colleges and the college decision process. I had some tough times along the way, as I am sure we all do, with the college selection process. It is intimidating to have such a big change in my life, especially when I feel so happy and comfortable here. I am anxious to get further along in the job search process, have a job solidified, and then of course to get my classroom set-up and get settled into my new school! It is a challenging experience to hear all the exciting plans that my friends already have for next year. Just today one of my friend Kari got accepted to Northeastern for a grad program in speech pathology, and yesterday another friend accepted a position in a Reconstructive Surgery ward at Faulkner Hospital in Jamaica Plains. Two other friends of mine have also been accepted to year of service programs, one in Texas and one in Baltimore. But for me it is challenging because it is still a little early in the year for many teaching jobs to be posted. But I have had one interview (last week over Easter break) and I am keeping my eyes open and applying as more positions are posted. I am so excited at the thought of the next stage of my life and having my own classroom. But at the same time I am intimidated and feel that I will miss my life and friends at Stonehill.

But I don't want to get too ahead of myself! I still have more than a month of doing the college balancing act before I settled into the next great chapter!

Less than 100 Days to Go!

2010-03-07T16:28:00.000-08:00

It never fails to surprise me how fast the middle of the semester always comes! The past two weeks have been very busy for everyone at Stonehill with mid-terms. It always seems that papers, projects, and exams get scheduled right before spring break. For me, with all my English courses, this meant that I have had quite a few papers due. I made it through the two busy weeks, and now it is the beginning of spring break. I am home now for a couple days, but on Tuesday I am going with my boyfriend to Los Angeles to visit his sister! I have never been to California before, so I am so excited for my first spring break trip over my last Stonehill spring break! I'll be sure to take lots of pictures so I can share my trip with you when I am back on campus!

To return to the past couple weeks of the semester that have led up to spring break, I have been busy not only with work but busy with some really exciting big events too! Two weeks ago was the first of our senior class events: 100 Days! Throughout the spring semester, we have a countdown to graduation marked by 100 Days, 50 Days, and 25 Days, not to mention the last week full of events leading up to commencement! But I'm not ready to talk about commencement yet, so let me tell you about 100 Days! For the event, we brought the dueling pianos from Jake Ivory's, a piano bar in Boston, to campus. It was a great event! The two pianos mostly played together, and I was really impressed with the great variety of songs that they played. We had everything from traditional Piano Bar music, like Billy Joel's Piano Man, but we also had lots of today's popular songs, such as Lady Gaga! Here's a picture of some seniors singing along with the dueling pianos:

My favorite aspect of the event was to have all of the senior class together! Stonehill is a school where students from every class get to know students from other other class; some of my close friends are also seniors, but some of my close friends are also in other grades as well. We do not just form communities within our classes, but we build a strong community including all Stonehill students. So the kick-off senior event served to unite our class, and set the stage for the rest of our last semester together.

Some friends and I before heading over to the 100 Days event!

Hanging out with my suite-mates at 100 Days!

The other big event of the past couple of weeks was my cousin's wedding! I always love big family events, and I had a great time celebrating with my family. Here are the bride and groom, Liz and Mike, cutting their cake and looking very happy!

Here is a picture of all my cousins on the Charest side of my family, with my cousin Liz, the beautiful bride in the center:

That's it for now because I've got to get going on my packing for California! Happy Spring Break everyone!

Spring is in Full Swing!

2010-02-12T08:47:00.000-08:00

Well, you must be thinking, what does she mean by saying "spring is in full swing?" And you are right, it is certainly not yet spring! In fact, it is still very much winter as evidenced by the snow storm and snow day we had in the middle of this week! What I do mean is that the spring semester is now in full swing! Next week I have a second response paper due for Postcolonial London and I am making a presentation in my Senior Capstone seminar, and then the following week I have two papers due! The onslaught of papers for the semester has officially begun!

Something else that is well underway is the construction of a new residence hall nearby my own residence hall! The building will be similar to the one I am living in now. It will be for upper classmen and will also be suite style. The drawings of the building that I have seen look great, and a couple weeks ago the College also had a furniture display so students could help choose the furniture that we will have in the building! It will be a popular place to live next year to be sure! Here are a couple views of the new building:

Not only has the spring semester gotten underway, but I also have some very new experiences and new beginnings headed my way! Last weekend I had two events that suggested to me that it is the time for new beginnings. The first was the Group Activity night for the new applications to the Orientation and Peer Mentor Program. Each year, new applicants to the leadership role take part in partner and group activities that allow Orientation staff to get to know the applicants better. Each year, the Orientation staff asks the seniors who have been involved in the Peer Mentor Program to come help observe the new applicants...because there are always so many! Let me tell you, incoming Class of 2014, there are over 90 friendly, smiling, enthusiastic, and loud current students already excited for the chance to get to know you and welcome you to Stonehill as your PM this summer and fall! We love new friends at Stonehill! I am sad I am not directly involved in the program this year, but it is so nice that as a senior, I still get to help out when I can!

On Saturday morning, I participated in a brand new program offered by Career Services called Senior Saturdays. It was a three hour chunk of time during which 7 seniors, with coffee in hand, marched over to Career Services to work one-on-one and in small groups with Christina Burney, the Associate Director of Career Services. We got helpful information and tips on resumes, cover letters, and networking, and then worked on our resumes, cover letters, and setting up LinkedIn accounts. We did some peer editing and then Christina also helped us one-on-one to edit our work! It was all very helpful and got me going on all these important facets of the job search! I am scheduled for a mock interview in two weeks as well, so I have lots to be doing as my job search for teaching jobs gets underway!

This semester will also be full of exciting events as this is my last semester of college! We recently announced this year's Spring Weekend performers! This year we will be hosting GirlTalk and State Radio! It should be a really good show! Stonehill seniors also have a couple traditional events every spring. The first of which is what we call 100 Days, which is an event that marks when we only have 100 days left at Stonehill! This year, 100 Days will be held on campus and the entertainment is dueling piano players from Jake Ivory's! I am in disbelief that yesterday I bought my ticket for 100 Days!!! Another event that all the seniors are currently gearing up for is Cape Week. For the week after finals and before graduation, a majority of the senior class all rents houses on the Cape, usually in the Dennis area. We have lots of informal gatherings that week as well as a senior formal dinner dance in Falmouth! Finally, this past week I booked a house with my suitemates! We will be staying in Dennisport, just a short walk from the beach! I am already crossing my fingers for good weather for the spring - for Cape Week, Spring Weekend, and graduation! Cross your fingers for us too?!

The Beginning of the End

2010-01-31T17:34:00.000-08:00

It is Day 14 of my last semester at Stonehill, and I am in disbelief that I have already been back on campus for that long! Out of all my semesters at Stonehill, the transition back to campus this semester has been easier for me than any other transition back to school. Unfortunately, it's a little too late since it's the last one! But in any case, I seem to have been able to jump right in on all my reading, which I have plenty of with three English classes, one of which is my Senior Capstone! Although, it's a little early for papers, so I will get back to you on how the transition from writing lesson plans to writing papers for college goes!

I have already been doing a lot of work, but I've had some good times with friends too! Last weekend was the Welcome Back Weekend for the spring semester, so we had a comedian in The Hill on Friday night, and then on Saturday there was the Whiteout Ball - which was the annual campus-wide semi-formal dance in the Sports Complex. Unfortunately, I didn't get to go to this dance because I had previous plans, but I heard from a lot of friends that it was a great time...complete with balloons!

So what did I do if I didn't go to the dance? Well, at the end of last semester, the girls in my suite planned a night out in Boston for our friend Alexia's 22nd birthday, which we were all so excited for! But unfortunately it ended up coinciding with the dance, nonetheless, we had a really fun girls' night out! Here are a couple pictures of us all dressed up before our big night out!

From left to right we have Alexia's friend from home Maria, and my suite-mates Kari-Ann, Carrie, Alexia, me, and Melissa. Don't we all look classy? :)

As of this Christmas break, I am also dating someone new! He is actually a really close friend from high school, in fact, we have known each other practically forever! We were even in the same third and fourth grade classes! It was quite a surprise to me to come home for Christmas break and to recognize this for the first time. But we are both very happy and have a lot to look forward to over the next several months!

I then spent a hectic week settling into the semester. I had lots of reading for my classes. This semester I am taking: Postcolonial London Literature, The City in American Literature, Fallen Women and Typewriter Girls (which is my senior seminar and looks at the constructs of the female gender in mostly Victorian literature), Mathematical Reasoning for Educators, and Honors Environmental Science. It is quite a course load because every one of these classes are fulfilling my last five requirements for graduation! I'm just so happy I was able to fit all the requirements in nicely...and with some very interesting topics!

This week I also settled into some of the extra activities I do on campus, such as my role with the Student Ambassador/Tour Guide program, Kappa Delta Pi (which is the Education Honor Society), and I have also set up a work study job in the Office of Student Activities, which I have done a lot of work with in my four years at Stonehill and just generally love to be a part of! :)

For now there's more reading calling my name, but I am looking forward to blogging to all of you about all of the exciting, scary, emotional, happy, sad, intimidating, thrilling, and just plain fun things that will be going on during my last semester!

Final Round at the Hill

2010-01-17T12:56:00.000-08:00

I am currently in a state of disbelief and denial that I am beginning my final semester at Stonehill. Not only have I absolutely loved my four years at Stonehill and I am not ready for them to be over, I am not sure I am ready for everything "extra" - applying for jobs and preparing for the real world - that comes with the final semester of college. Part of me is looking forward to the next stage in my life; I think that I will like the working world and being able to settle down. I hate packing and moving, so while it is nice to have two homes, I will like being settled in one place again for a while!

My plan right now is to apply this semester for teaching jobs close to home so I can live at home, save money, and dedicate myself to my first classroom! Then after a year, maybe two, I plan to go back to school for my Master's, somewhere in the field of education. I need some more time before I decide what I will want to get my Master's in! As of now, for this semester, my goal is to find a teaching job! I have done some things over this Christmas break to start that process, but a lot of my time this semester will be dedicated to the job search! There's a long way to go, and I won't feel relaxed until I have a job!

This semester I have my final five classes needed for my two majors and general education requirements. I will be taking three English classes, one of which is my senior capstone seminar. Those classes are Postcolonial London, The City in American Literature, and my seminar is The Fallen Women. My other two classes are Honors Principles of Environmental Science and Mathematical Reasoning for Educators. I am looking forward to these classes, and it will be nice to have a change with the science and math classes since I haven't had any of either yet at Stonehill!

As of now, I am all packed...despite the fact that I am, as always, over-packed! It always seems that my things seem to multiply each time I move back to school. I hope when I am unpacking tomorrow I will be able to fit everything in my room!

Right now, I can't wait to get back to campus and catch up with all of my friends! It will be an exciting semester, with lots of senior activities and job searching - I am sure I will taking advantage of everything Stonehill has to offer one last time!

Home for the Holidays

2010-01-06T16:30:00.000-08:00

I love Christmas, and I love getting to be home for Christmas! Putting up the Christmas tree, playing Christmas music, seeing Christmas lights everywhere, and baking Christmas cookies are some of my favorite sights, sounds, and smells of the season that I don't think I could live without! But one of the very best things about Christmas, especially after being away from home for a semester, is getting to spend lots of time with family and friends! The house pictured here is just down the street from my own house. Every year they cover their house and front yard with Christmas lights and decorations and they put on a light show with the lights coordinated to Christmas music that passersby can tune their stations to as they drive by! It is a popular sight to visit in my hometown during the Christmas season!

Every year, for ten years now, my friend, Kate, from high school has been hosting an annual Christmas party! At first, in middle school, it was just the girls. But then, once we discovered boys, it became co-ed. Now, I am so glad that we continue the tradition because it is the best way to get ALL of our high school friends together again! I do still see a lot of my hometown friends, and I have been able to spend a lot of time with them all this break. But we are all so busy and have such very different schedules that it is hard to get everyone together often. Some of my friends are working full-time, some are taking college classes still, and one of my friends is even engaged and getting married Labor Day weekend this year!!! (I am still adjusting to this getting older thing!) But for this year's Christmas party most of us all had a great time playing board games and eating all of our favorite junk food snacks! Especially, Kate's famous calzone and my brownies - favorites since high school!

My friend Brandon (aka "Dobes" - my friends have a lot of nicknames!) and I at Kate's Christmas party.

My friends and I also celebrated together on New Year's Eve at my friend Brennan's house. Here I am with girlfriends Tessa and Kate.

Then, when Christmas rolled around, I celebrated with not one, but FOUR Christmases! My immediate family and I celebrated Christmas Eve with some of my dad's side of the family with dinner at our house. Then on Christmas Day, after opening presents from Santa of course, we went to my gramma's house to celebrate with my mom's side of the family. But now that I have had cousins who have gotten married, and we don't get to see my mom's cousins often, we always hold more Christmas gatherings so we get to see all of the family who we didn't get to see on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day! I always enjoy these parties because they are more casual than Christmas and we get to play with new Christmas presents!

My family at our house on Christmas Eve.

My sister, Lindsay, and cousins Liz and Emily at my gramma's house on Christmas Day.

The day after Christmas, all the siblings and cousins on my dad's side got together over my aunt's house. It was exciting because we got to see Cameron, my cousin's 7 month old baby, and the newest addition to our family! We ordered Chinese food and did a Yankee Swap (re-gifting encouraged!) I ended up with a great number, and the gift I received was a bottle of wine! We also played Telestrations, a game that my sister received for Christmas from my aunt. It is basically telephone but with pictures.

Cameron is an excellent gift-unwrapper! And of course his puppy, Simon, wanted to help!

Playing Telestrations!

Then just this past weekend, we finally had our fourth Christmas, which had been postponed because of last weekend's snowstorm. We went out to Methuen, MA to my mom's cousin's house to see the second cousins on my mom's side of the family who we don't get to see too often. It was another fun day...although very disappointing because the Patriots lost badly.

I really enjoyed this year's holiday season with my family and friends. It was enjoyable and relaxing. I was reflecting during the holiday that it was just one Christmas ago that I returned from my semester abroad. Last Christmas I was jet-lagged and going through re-entry, and this year I was resting up from a very busy semester of student teaching! Both Christmas breaks were very welcome vacations!

Mr. Stonehill Opening Dance Video!!!!

2009-12-21T13:26:00.000-08:00

Here's the video of the opening dance number from Mr. Stonehill 2009!

I owe a HUGE thank you to my friend Nick from high school, who spent a couple hours helping me figure out how to get this video on the blog to all of you! It took many attempts at changing the type, size, and location of this video, but at long last - here it is! Hope you all enjoy it as much as I did!

Final Days of Student Teaching

2009-12-20T17:21:00.000-08:00

It is hard to believe that I have spent much of the past four years preparing for my student teaching practicum - and now it has come and gone! I am now prepared to have my own classroom! It is both an exciting and scary thought that soon I will be starting a brand new application process - that of applying for teaching jobs!

Student teaching was a great experience. I learned so much from my cooperating practitioner, and as I assess myself as a teacher, I can see the progress I have made since September. My classroom management techniques have grown, I have learned many ideas for how to set up my own classroom, and I have prepared numerous lessons. I feel so much more confident about starting my own classroom now after student teaching than I did before. I have heard many current teachers say that student teaching is what prepares you best for your own classroom - and although I still do not yet have my own classroom, I would have to agree!

The last week of the semester was more low-key for me since my cooperating practitioner once again took over a majority of the teaching. But in addition to some teaching, I stayed busy observing other teachers and also making two new bulletin boards to leave my students with. Here are my final projects:

The most exciting part of my final week, however, is when my kids surprised me with a small party and going away gift. A mom volunteered to bake a cake for us to have during our small party, and together the class presented me with a gift. During art class, all of the kids decorated a big L.L. Bean bag monogramed with Ms. Charest with their hand prints. Then they filled the bag with gifts they donated to me to begin my own classroom library with. It was the best gift I have ever gotten! I will definitely use it during my first few years of teaching!

Now I am excited to have a long winter break for Christmas! It was a challenging, busy, exciting, nerve-wracking, and exhausting semester, so I am certainly excited to relax with family and friends, re-organize, and re-charge for my final semester at Stonehill! (I'm still not used to saying that by the way :/ ) I'll be blogging again soon about my holiday!

Mr. Stonehill 2009

2009-12-09T19:15:00.000-08:00

At the end of each fall semester is the ever-popular and long-awaited Mr. Stonehill "beauty pageant." It is one of the most popular events that the senior class traditionally hosts each year - and it is a TON of fun! Boys from all class years participate in the competition - which includes the swimwear, talent, and formal wear/Q&A categories. The weekend of Mr. Stonehill was very exciting for me besides the fact that it was that time of year again for Mr. Stonehill! My group of friends that has grown closer and closer over the past 4 years was reunited again! We all have been doing some exciting and important things - like studying abroad, internships, student teaching, and senior thesises - but this weekend, my friend Kathleen who was in D.C. for the semester, came to Stonehill to visit. Plus, none of us would miss Mr. Stonehill for the world, so we all got together before going to the show! Here's a picture of the girls reunited!

The first category is swimwear. Here are a couple highlights from this year's swimwear competition:

Tim Cushing, Student Government Association Executive Board Treasurer by day, body builder by night!

Real-life lifeguard, Travis Kumph, also dressed as one during Mr. Stonehill '09!

This year my friends and I were very impressed with all of the 14 guys' talents! They worked so hard to prepare their acts, and they all did really well! There was singing, dancing, magic, and more! We also had many "celebrities" participate in the talent portion of the show. We had Clenny Kravitz (Clenton McArthur), Beyonce (aka Conor Nordengren) doing "her" Single Ladies dance, and even a special guest appearance from hubby Jay-Z (Randall Stalworth). But the winner of the talent portion of the competition was Randy Jose for his dance tribute to Michael Jackson. It was fabulous!

"Clenny Kravitz"

Beyonce and Jay-Z

Some of the guys singing background while contestant Nate Illsley performed "One Week" by the Barenaked Ladies.

The final category the guys compete in is formal wear and a question and answer session. Here are a couple pictures of the guys with their escorts on stage to answer their question.

Jay Ardizonni with his little sister as his escort.

Senior Pat Higgins with girlfriend Erin Rozwat.

In addition to each category that the guys compete in, they also spend countless hours perfecting their dance moves for the opening and closing numbers, this year choreographed by senior Jill Eid, and also videotaping sketches for the opening and other intermissions during the show. This year's theme was Vegas, and they did a re-make of The Hangover as the opening video. It was pretty funny, they had everything from the beginning of the movie covered - even the baby and tiger! Right after the opening video, the guys entered with strobe lights and music and went right into the opening dance number. I loved the opening dance! Stonehill students love to dance, and I must say, we have some of the best dancers around! I took a video of the opening dance that I have been trying to upload all week - without success! I will continue to try to get the video uploaded, so check back to see what great dancers our guys are!

From Thanksgiving to Christmas

2009-12-02T19:10:00.000-08:00

It was so nice to be home at the end of last week for Thanksgiving break. Thanksgiving fell in the middle of my 15 consecutive days of take-over, so it came as a much needed long weekend to write my lessons for this week, and also to catch up on some R&R! In fact, the first thing I did when I got home on Wednesday afternoon after our half day of school, was to take a 3 hour long nap!

School was fun on Wednesday though, because we had a morning of Thanksgiving arts and crafts. We had lots of family volunteers come in to assist with the activities, while I ran the cornucopia water-color activity! We had 10 crafts in all that students in my class and the second grade class next door rotated through. Here are pictures of my favorite crafts:

Isn't the pineapple turkey cute?! My favorite thing about Thanksgiving break was being able to spend time with friends and family. I saw New Moon with my cousins, went out with a couple high school friends, had lunch with my gramma, and of course had a delicious Thanksgiving dinner at my other grandma's home. Here are a couple pictures of me and my family on Thanksgiving:

Now that Thanksgiving has come and gone, Stonehill is already gearing up for Christmas! Last night we had the annual tree lighting event on the quad. Two of Stonehill's a capella groups performed Christmas carols and the lights on the trees on the quad were lit up for the first time! :) My friends and I tried to get some pictures, but it's never easy to get good night photos! Here's what we ended up with! But you can notice our cups of hot apple cider and hot chocolate that we got in the Chapel after the tree lighting - YUM!

Over the next week and a half (the last week of classes before finals), there will be many events, all part of Finals Countdown, planned and run by students with the guidance of the Student Activities office. I am pleased to announce that part of Finals Countdown will be arguably the most popular annual Stonehill event - Mr. Stonehill! I wouldn't miss the male "beauty" pageant for the world, so I'll try to get some good pictures to share next week!

I Survived Week One of Take-Over!

2009-11-14T12:54:00.000-08:00

Whew! Well, I survived my first week of take-over, and what a week it was! Being in take-over means that I have full responsibility for the classroom. My teacher is in and out of the classroom just checking on things and making sure I have things under control, but even when she is there, I am still in charge. But despite all the challenges, things are still going pretty well!

On day 1, my class was scheduled for hearing and vision tests, and my cooperating practitioner told me they were at 9:15. So at 9:15 I had my class downstairs set up outside the library with work to keep them busy while they waited, only to find out when I called the nurse to find out that it wasn't scheduled to start until 9:30. So I lost 15 very crucial minutes with the kids! I had a lot to get through for my reading lesson that morning, and I could have used those 15 minutes. I ended up having to rush through the whole class lesson, and then rush through my small reading groups too. But I was happy that somehow I still got through it all!

On day 2, I had a little boy get sick...luckily it was into the trash can. But you can just imagine the commotion that it caused! By Tuesday afternoon, I was also not feeling well. I had been fighting a cold the previous week, so after two full days of school, I was exhausting and my cough was getting worse. Luckily, we had Veteran's Day off from school. It was a much needed day of rest and time to get some work done! I also went to Health Services because I felt an ear infection coming on, and they got me all set up with medication. Now I've been feeling a lot better over the past few days!

Day 3 brought more surprises when my paraprofessional was out sick and we had a substitute in the room. But it all worked out okay. As a teacher, I am learning to just meet each new day head-on, take what the day brings because every day there's something new, and just do the best to adjust to all the changes, interruptions, and unexpected surprises that come my way. I am certainly learning how important it is for a teacher to be flexible!

Friday afternoon I attended an open house for the Urban Catholic Teaching Corps through Boston College at their residence in Dorchester. The UCTC is a service-teaching opportunity in which I would get the opportunity to teach in Urban Catholic schools in Boston and also work on my Masters degree at BC's Lynch School of Education. There is a similar program called the Providence Alliance for Catholic Educators through Providence College that I am also looking into. The open house last night was really informative, and all of the students currently in the program are the nicest, friendliest, and most welcoming people! I still have a lot of thinking and decision making to do about what is the best fit for me for next year. I am sure that my Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks will be full of resume and application writing!

For now, I have LOTS of lesson planning to do for next week! Hope you all enjoy your weekend, while I get back to work!

A Happening Happy Halloween

2009-11-03T19:32:00.000-08:00

Happy (belated) Halloween! I hope everyone enjoyed the holiday! Can you believe it's already November?! And that means Thanksgiving is right around the corner!

Let me tell you a little bit about how I celebrated Halloween this year. My celebration started with a Halloween party in first grade Friday afternoon. All week the students worked on making Spooky Bingo boards - they had to color Halloween pictures, cut them out, and glue them onto their bingo boards - so everyone's came out differently. We spent the afternoon playing Spooky Bingo with the second grade classroom next door. We had a couple parents come in and help check bingo boards because when the students got "Spooky Bingo" they won a prize! We also had lots of candy and goodies as a snack during our party. It was a fun afternoon, but also really hectic and tiring for us teachers! The kids were all really excited for the weekend!

As usual I had a busy weekend and it felt like I spent a lot of time working! But I did take Saturday night off to enjoy the Freak Week Dance in the Sports Complex. Stonehill students definitely love to dance, and proof of this is just how many students attend each dance that we have. We have a couple large themed dances each year, and Halloween is one of them. There must be over 1,000 students, nearly half our student body who attend the dances! Plus, this one is extra special because everyone gets decked out in costumes. I am always impressed by the really creative ideas (because I am not very good at being creative).

Princess Lolly (Kari-Ann), Audrey Hepburn (Melissa), Queen Frostine (Alexia), Miss Mint (my roommate Carrie), and I in the common room of our suite before the dance.

At the dance in the Sports Complex, we also found Kait and Emma!

This year my roommate and some of our friends who live in our suite, decided to go as Candyland characters, which I thought was a great idea! Unfortunately, I just didn't know how to put together a costume to be Jolly! :( But it all worked out because I was able to borrow a costume from my friend Sarah and I went as a pirate.

But now I really need to be getting to bed! It's almost my bedtime, and I am being observed tomorrow for the second time by my college supervisor. He will be observing me teach a math lesson on even and odd numbers. Then as soon as that is over, I need to finish up this week's planning so I can begin planning for next week because next week I begin my take-over! That means that I will be in charge of everything in the classroom! I'm so nervous I am going to forget things and not be able to get it all done! But this week I need to put together homework for next week, Reading Workshop jobs, and work on my block plans so that this weekend I can write all my long lesson plans. Getting all my lesson plans done is going to be a challenge, so I will need to be working very hard over the next five and a half weeks!

Bulletin Boards Galore!

2009-10-24T10:44:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone!

I've got another week of student teaching under my belt, and now it's only two weeks until my 15 day take-over! Yikes! And I still have so many assignments that need to get done before I get too busy with planning for those 15 days!

This week at school, I completed my Fall Into Reading bulletin board, which I told you about a couple weeks ago. I had the students choose a book, write about why it is their favorite book, and then draw an illustration that also shows why it is their favorite book.

This week I also taught a couple science lessons. In first grade, the focus is mostly on learning how to read and write and the basics of math so that students can then be successful in future grades, plus on the MCAS, which is our state-wide assessment that students in Massachusetts are required to pass in order to graduate high school. Plus, it's very early on in the year, so we are still really just learning how to read and write. For these reasons, there isn't much time left for science and social studies. But this week, we were able to tie in some science. First, I taught a lesson on the seasons, and we talked about the changes in weather, plants, and animals from season to season. The students then completed Season Weather Charts that I created. The next day, we went on a nature walk! We discussed the types of things that we would be able to find in nature during the fall (leaves, pine cones, acorns, etc.). On the nature walk, students found three items to bring back to the classroom to then make observations about. Students recorded their observations about the color, size, shape, weight, and texture of their items.

To further tie these lessons together and to provide additional enrichment about the fall season, I also brought in Indian Corn, pumpkins, and gourds, and with those items as well as samples of students' work, I created a bulletin board for our science table. I am really happy with how that turned out as well!

This week was a busy one besides teaching! I also went home Wednesday night because I had an appointment and then stayed for a home-cooked meal. It was nice to see my parents, and also pick up some things I needed. But it was a very long day! I didn't get back to Stonehill until almost 9:00 P.M.! Then they next morning on my way to school, I was rear-ended! No one was injured, and my car wasn't too badly damaged, but on Friday I was so sore and tired! I was surprised by how much a little car accident like that took out of me! Even though there was a lot going on, I had made plans to go visit my sister at Endicott College for dinner on Friday night. I was really excited to see her, so I still made the trip, and then was able to get a good night's sleep back here at Stonehill. The rest of the weekend looks like lots and lots of lesson planning, and well as finishing and working on a couple assignments for my student teaching seminar! This weekend at Stonehill is also Alumni Weekend, so if I have time, I am hoping maybe I will be running into some recent alums who are back for the weekend - either out enjoying the football game (despite the rainy weather) or perhaps at Brother Mike's - the bar on campus that takes place a few times a month.

My sister, Lindsay, and I.

As for next week, it looks like we will be doing some Halloween activities at school. On campus, Freak Week has already begun and will continue through next weekend! Check back next week for Halloween updates!!

*Note: Due to privacy restrictions, pictures of Kayla's classroom were removed

Columbus Day Weekend in Washington D.C.

2009-10-16T18:12:00.001-07:00

Here it is! The long awaited (or so I'd like to think) blog post about this past weekend, which I spent with friends in D.C.! I was very nervous about going away for an entire long weekend while I am student teaching. But I had such a great time, seeing my friend Kathleen and all the D.C. sights. Plus, we made so many great memories that I just know we will look back and laugh about in years to come! It was totally worth having a very busy school week upon my arrival back on campus!

This week at school I videotaped myself teach a math lesson so I can now analyze it (which was an assignment for my student teaching seminar), and I also had my first formal observation of my teaching! And I feel like it went pretty well. I received both positive feedback as well as some constructive feedback on things to consider when I am planning my lessons. My college supervisor observed me teach two small reading groups, and then we sat and discussed my daily reflective journal, all of the lessons I have prepared and taught, the teaching he observed me do, and also my PPA, or the Pre-service Performance Assessment, which is required by the state of Massachusetts for teacher licensure. I have been really enjoying everything about teaching and being in school. The toughest hurdle I have been having is that it is just so tiring, so by the time I get home after school, I am exhausted, but I still have many requirements to meet for Stonehill - such as the journal, PPA, writing long lesson plans that are much more involved than any veteran teacher will prepare, as well as other small assignments. It is all the extra work required for learning how to become a teacher that gives me a schedule that's like having classes on top of a full time job. The toughest thing about student teaching, is being a college student living on campus, but having a schedule that is by no means like a college students' schedule.

But enough about my week at school! Let me fill you in on my fun and enjoyable weekend in D.C.! It was certainly a nice break from the hustle and bustle of school! My friends Emma, Kari, Kait, and I all flew down to D.C. Friday night. Of course, we couldn't make it out of Logan, without being delayed, so by the time we made it to American University to stay with our friend Kathleen, it was after midnight and we went straight to bed! Kathleen is a Stonehill student as well, but she is studying for the semester at AU and also interning. However, she actually just left on Thursday for a three-week travel experience to Bosnia with her program! It was nice to be able to spend some time with her before she left!

After sleeping in and getting Starbucks on Saturday morning, we had an afternoon of touring. We met up with my fellow blogger, Matt, who as you may know, is giving tours of the Capital as a part of his internship. Matt very kindly gave us a personalized tour of the Capital! (He even pointed out to us where he was when he saw J Lo!) Here are some pictures of our Capital visit:

Kathleen, Kait, Emma, myself, and Kari outside the Capital, in front of the Washington Monument and the National Mall.

At the center of Washington D.C.!

We also went to the Botanical Gardens. It was so pretty!

Saturday night we spent getting dinner and visiting with many other Stonehill students who are also studying or interning in D.C. for the semester and some of their friends. We also went out to Adams Morgan, which is the place to be for young people in D.C.

Sunday was a full day of sightseeing, and was very exhausting because we did a LOT of walking! Kathleen needed to get some work done on a mid-term, so Emma, Kait, Kari, and I found our way around the city. We stopped by the National Archives, Ford's Theater and the House Where Lincoln Died (as it is so eloquently labled), and the White House, among other sights that we happened upon as we meandered through our nation's capital.

Kari is taking a photography course at Stonehill, and so she was taking some really awesome photos. I really like this one of me outside of the Archives!

After dinner, we gave ourselves a self-guided tour of the monuments by night. It was exhausting because it was the end of a busy weekend and there was a long way to walk in between monuments, which we hadn't realized ahead of time. But as exhausting as it was, this was my favorite part of the entire weekend. The monuments are so famous, that I was really excited to be there and to get to see it all in person for the first time. All of the monuments are beautiful at night, but I think my favorite was walking around the WWII Memorial, the Reflecting Pool, and the Lincoln Memorial. Being able to look back and see the Washington Monument and the Capital was breath-taking. I also enjoyed this part of the tour because it was kind of like the grand finale, and we also were able to see Matt again as well as Sam and Dan, two other friends of ours from Stonehill. It was so nice to be able to take in the atmosphere and enjoy each other's company, with Lincoln himself! Here are some pictures of the monuments:

The Washington Monument

The Jefferson Memorial

FDR Memorial

WWII Memorial

Lincoln Memorial - with Kait, Matt, Dan, Sam, Emma, and Kari!

Well, it is time for me to go have a productive weekend and also to get some sleep! Hope everyone has an enjoyable weekend!

Stonehill's Wilderness

2009-10-04T13:55:00.001-07:00

So I was sitting at my desk today writing lesson plans, when all of a sudden I noticed three deer in the woods outside my window!

The pictures didn't come out very good with the shadows from the trees, but can you see this deer's two friends in the woods?!

Anyway, I was excited to see the deer, and just wanted to share it with someone!

Fall is in the Air

2009-10-03T11:33:00.000-07:00

My original plan was to write this blog on Monday night, and now here I am , Saturday afternoon, with my first chance to take the time to write! So I apologize for the delay, but now I have a lot to update you on!

Last weekend I went home, which is something I don't do often, usually I only go home when they close the residence halls and on Columbus Day weekend. But I had a couple reasons for going home. Next weekend, which is Columbus Day weekend, I am going to D.C. to visit my friend Kathleen who is interning and studying at American University for the semester! So I won't be able to go home next weekend, and I needed to bring back some warmer clothes and also carry-on luggage for our flight! Also, it was my cousin's baby's christening, so I went home to go to the christening. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I also took the GREs! I had Monday off from school for Yom Kippur, so I decided this was the ideal day to take the GREs, because who knows when I will get another good opportunity with my student teaching schedule! I was lucky that I was able to put all of these things into one long weekend at home.

While I was home I was able to sleep in, I got a flu shot from a neighbor who is a nurse, did some errands to buy things for school with my mom, and also went apple picking with my mom and my gramma. Per my request, my mom then made me apple crisp and sent me back to school with apples and apple muffins that I am still eating! I was so excited to do something that is a fall tradition - now it truly feels like fall is here! Here are some pictures of our apple picking adventure:

Picking an apple! Yum!

Gramma with her pumpkin outside the orchard's barn.

Tractor rides out into the orchard!

My mom and I also picked out some mums to put on the front porch at home.

Sunday was a very long day. I left the house with my parents early to go pick up my sister from Endicott College, where she is a sophomore. This was the first time I have been there this year, so I was excited to see her room. I'm pretty jealous of her room, she and her roommate have their own bathroom, and lots of space! It is nicely decorated and feels very home-y. We then went to Salem, MA for Cameron's christening. It was nice to see lots of family. Cameron's mom is actually a Stonehill alum, and she also taught at the same school that I am student teaching at now! Here are some pictures of Cameron's big day:

Cameron with mom and dad (my cousin Dan and his wife Lisa), godmother (my cousin Amanda), and godfather (Lisa's brother). By the way, the priest who performed the service actually used to work here at Stonehill!

Cam was excited to get changed out of his christening dress and into his new Teddy Bruschi jersey in time for game time!

On the way home from Salem, my mom, dad, and I stopped by my mom's new office building in Waltham, MA. National Grid, her company, just moved into the brand new building this summer, so it was the first time I got to see her office. I really liked getting to see where she works! Plus, the building is beautiful! It's too bad that Waltham is such a long commute from home! I went to bed early Sunday night after getting packed and ready to come back to school. Monday morning I was up early to take the GREs and then drove right back to Stonehill afterwards to get back for my student teaching seminar. By the time I was unpacked, it was already getting late and I had to prep for the next day of school!

The rest of the school week went well, and also went by fast since it was a four day week. I took on a lot more teaching than I have so far. I taught two grammar lessons on sentences, a math lesson on using tally marks, two whole class literacy lesson (phonics and anthology reading, etc.), as well as a couple small reading group lessons! Plus, I started working on my bulletin board for the month of October! I decided to do a Fall Into Reading Board, complete with pumpkins and a tree with leaves that are changing color!

Last week in school was also our Curriculum Night when parents are invited to the classroom to learn about what the students learn about and do in school. We did a lot of prep work to get ready for Curriculum Night! For example, I put together our Beary Special Class wall outside the door of the classroom, our Meet My Family display, and also a Best Buddies bulletin board.
But my favorite part of our work for Curriculum Night were the heads that each of the students made in art to put on the back of their chairs. I worked with all of the students on finishing their hair all week long! We asked the students to bring in a shirt that we put over their heads and chairs. When the parents arrived, we asked them to "find their student in the classroom." They all came out so cute, they really looked like our students, and it was a huge hit with the families!

Well I have a lot of lesson planning and brainstorming for future lessons plus other work for my seminar to do, so it's back to work for me on this rainy weekend! Check back for my next post about my Columbus Day trip to D.C.!!!!

*Note: Due to privacy concerns, some classroom photos have been removed

The First Days of First Grade

2009-09-20T09:44:00.000-07:00

I've been student teaching for a week and a half now, and what a week and a half it's been! The time has gone by very quickly, because each day is so busy and non-stop, but I also feel very comfortable in my role as a teacher - as if I have been doing this for a lot longer than 8 days! The student teaching experience so far has had its ups and downs, but overall, I have really been enjoying being back in first grade!

First grade is a very exciting year, and especially for my first graders in Mansfield because this is the first time that they have been in school for a full day. Each afternoon there are a couple students who complain that they are tired, don't want to do their work, and just really want to take a nap. We tell them that they will be fine, we just have a little bit longer to go, but little do they know that I often feel the same way by the time I get home after school! We've already done a lot of work, but I think they will be in for a shock when they get homework for the first time tomorrow!

Over the past week and a half, we have done some small writing projects, and lots of illustrating. The kids have written about their favorite part of the summer, and about something they have in common with a classmate. We have learned about the letters A-H, and written and illustrated a page for each of these letters in their ABC books. We have learned and sung songs about colors and teddy bears (we are known as the teddy bear classroom because my cooperating teacher loves teddy bears and used them throughout her room). Each day I come home with these songs stuck in my head and sing them to my roommate! We have even started to learn about bigger and smaller numbers and coins in math. We have learned the Monster Squeeze and Penny Dice games and play them to practice these math skills. Since we are the teddy bear classroom, the students were actually allowed to bring their teddy bears to school on Friday, and we began a small writing/illustrating project about their teddy bears! All of the students are still learning how to read and write of course, although some are already further along than others, but first grade will be a monumental year for learning how to read and write. Right now, the students are expected to sound out the words and do they best they can with their spelling by writing the letters for the sounds that they hear.

One of my favorite parts of the set-up of our classroom are these risers - it makes sitting on the rug so much easier! Here you can see the students' teddy bears scattered around the rug area.

My role in the classroom so far has been a lot of observing and assisting. I assist the students when they have questions, and also help my cooperating teacher with planning and preparation. My teacher has even let me take on some of her teacher responsibilities! I taught a short lesson on listening and the school listening look, and I have already written a lesson that I will teach next week on nonverbal signals. I have done a lot of copying, laminating, cutting, gluing, posting, correcting morning work, passing out papers, etc. This week I also led the morning meeting a couple times, but beginning on Monday, we will be putting the students in charge of running morning meeting! My teacher likes to give the students a lot of responsibility and encourages them to be independent early on. (An important skill to learn in first grade!) Soon I will gradually begin taking on more and more responsibility up until I have my full three week take over at the end of the semester when I will be in charge of everything in the classroom! I am very anxious to be taking on more, but I am also very nervous! I am exhausted and so busy already, and I haven't even begun half of what I will be responsible for this semester! This is a scary and intimidating thought! I need to be prepared for it to just get busier! Some of what makes it busy is also the work I have to do for my seminar at Stonehill, the requirements that we need to fulfill in terms of the lessons that we plan, and also the Pre-servive Performance Assessment that is required by the state of Massachusetts. But I am enjoying it, so it makes it all worth it.

The morning meeting bulletin board, which includes our daily schedule, the calendar, school day tally, money date with coins, and the weather chart and lost tooth graph - both of which I helped prepare.

I am also really enjoying working with my cooperating practitioner, Lisa DiSangro. Lisa has been teaching in Mansfield for over fifteen years, and in addition to her experience in first grade she used to teach in a multi-age classroom - where first and second graders would stay in the same room for two years. Although she doesn't do this looping anymore, she still coordinates projects and assignments with the second grade teacher next door. They are old pros at teaching, they have their plans from previous years, and they know exactly how to do things - thanks to their years of seeing what does and doesn't work. Mary-Ann Centrella (the second grade teacher next door) and Lisa are like two peas in a pod! I think they can probably even read each other's minds, that's how fluidly and smoothly their interactions and coordinated lesson plans run.

Lisa is a great teacher, and I have already learned a lot of about her pedagogy and her style of teaching. I have seen things that I would like to adapt for my own classroom, but also some things I may do differently. Lisa has a ton of energy, and she has to in order to manage a classroom full of first graders and her own three sons! The best way I can describe her is to say that she is a whirlwind! She gets things done and lessons pulled together so efficiently and effectively. She's had so much experience and knows the ropes so well that she could probably teach in her sleep! Hopefully one day my teaching experience will make as great a teacher!

*Note: Due to privacy concerns, some of the classroom photos have been removed

Reel Big Fish on a Real Big Weekend

2009-09-06T10:37:00.000-07:00

This week was the first week of classes, for almost everyone except me! I am student teaching in a district that doesn't start school until after Labor Day, so my full schedule doesn't start until this week. I go to school for a full day on Tuesday for teacher meetings, and then Wednesday is the first day of school. Nonetheless, I stayed very busy this past week!

We had our first student teaching seminar on Tuesday. We just went over all the requirements for student teaching, but it still made us all a little intimidated and stressed and nervous about student teaching. There are so many state requirements that we need to meet and assignments for our seminar that we need to complete in addition to gradually taking on more and more responsibility in our classrooms, until we have a three-week take-over at the end of the semester (when we will be fully in charge of our classrooms)!

On Thursday I went to the open house at my school. I met my teacher for the first time, and I like her a lot! She is full of energy, super organized (like me), and I can already tell her students really like her! I also met all but one of my students and their families. It was great to get to meet them, and for them to meet me and my teacher, Mrs. DiSangro, before the first day of school. I think we will all feel more comfortable on the first day of school now!

Since I am not too busy yet, I was also able to help a lot with my extra-curricular activities that I am involved in on campus and love. Friday and Saturday mornings I gave tours (here's a shout-out to all the prospective students I met this weekend!). This year I also decided to get involved in Student Government Association's Programming Committee. Programming is in charge of the large events and theme weeks that take place on campus. So I assisted with this weekend's Welcome Back Week events.

Friday afternoon we had an activities fair on the quad where everyone could sign-up for as many of the clubs and organizations that interest them as they want. Friday night we had a concert in the Sports Complex. I helped with set-up, working the door, and take-down, and of course I got to watch the concert too!

Martin Earley, a Stonehill student and a really great musician, was our opening act.

Reel Big Fish has a really cool sound. They're pretty chill, and even have trumpets! I don't know much of their music, but they did cover Brown Eyed Girl and Take On Me. Since I worked at the concert, I also got to meet them during our meet and greet - I don't have those pictures yet, but maybe I will soon!

My roommate, Carrie, and I at the concert.

On Saturday afternoon, we had Hillapalooza, an event that features performances by Stonehill musicians and sometimes other small bands, and takes place a couple times a year. Since it is still early on, we were able to have Hillapalooza out on the quad. We had two Stonehill students perform, and three other bands. Here is Power Lines, one of those bands:

In addition to the Woodstock theme afternoon of music, we also had a free BBQ and an arts fest - and lots of lounging around on the quad. There were booths selling items, such as fruit and organic soaps, the art club made a chalk mural, there was a booth to make free spin-art sunglasses, and we also sold jewelry for the Bead for Life charity, which were a huge hit! Women with AIDS in Uganda make these bracelets, necklaces, and even some earrings out of recycled paper in order to make money for the care they require:

Finally, on Saturday night, we had a showing of the movie, The Proposal on the quad. It was a relaxing and enjoyable weekend. The rest of the long weekend I spent relaxing and also getting started on looking into post-grad options and getting myself organized and started on student teaching assignments. I'll let you know how school goes after my first week!

Back to School...for the Last Time at Stonehill :(

2009-09-02T13:38:00.000-07:00

I'm a senior. It's a statement that's easy to say, but very difficult to wrap my mind around. Being a senior means that 3/4 of my time at Stonehill has already come and gone int he blink of an eye and that in less than a year I will be entering the real world. Scary stuff. But on another level, being a senior means that I am in the prime of the college years, and I have so many things, such as 100 and 50 days, Mr. Stonehill, and Cape Week - just to name a couple Stonehill traditions - to look forward to. The best way to put it is that the beginning of my senior year is bittersweet. I am feeling optimistic about the fun times and memories I will have and share with my friends this year. But I am also feeling overwhelmed by the daunting task of preparing for a life after Stonehill, which includes, but is not limited to, taking the GREs, applying to grad schools, and applying for jobs. I don't feel old enough for this yet!

But to start this year's series of blogs, let me describe my first week back at school, my new room and roommate, and of course fall orientation!

I moved in early (a week before all other upperclassmen) for fall orientation training. I was excited to move-in early because this means I could avoid the business of move-in day, and get settled and comfortable in my room before classes start. I am living in Du Lac, which is generally known as the "quiet dorm," which will be perfect for me this semester since I am student teaching. Here are some pictures of me moving in:

And also my room fully set-up after my roommate also moved in:

My roommate, Carrie, is from Queensbury, New York, and, like me, she is an Elementary Education major. In fact, also like me, Carrie is also teaching first grade at the Robinson Elementary School in Mansfield! We are very excited that we will be sharing the same experience this fall and are fully prepared to support each other since we will be going through the exact same thing. Carrie's second major is fine arts, and she is specializing in graphic design. She has worked with her dad making brochures for all the Lake George attractions near her home. As you may remember from my summer posts, Carrie is outdoorsy and adventurous, and she is also a lover of country music like me! We are living in a suite with Carrie's group of really sweet friends. It's perfect for senior year! I also have lots of friends all over campus in the other upperclassmen housing, so I am sure I will be spending a lot of time in those residence areas too!
My first week at Stonehill was full of training and preparation for fall orientation. During the week we heard from offices such as the Counseling and Testing Center, Academic Services, and Campus Ministry for planning the Into the Streets volunteer afternoon. We spent time discussing and planning the Transitions course, which is a way to help students transition to college and deal with issues such as time management, making friends, getting along with roommates, and finding resources on campus. We also trained for the sexual assault awareness program that all incoming students are required to attend. But my favorite parts of the week's training were when we got together with the other groups of student leaders on campus. The Peer Mentors, Crossings Student Ministers, and ALANA Brothers and Sisters helped the RAs with training. We assisted with being the participants in party scenarios that RAs may encounter during the school year. For the first time, all four groups of student leaders met for the Student Leader Experience in the atrium of the new science building. We got to meet new people and learn about the roles of each of the other groups and also discovered how much we have in common. Here are a couple pictures of the event in the atrium of the science building:

Fall Orientation began on Saturday when the first-year students moved on campus. We held Building Socials in the Residence Halls, which included pizza, ice cream, pictures, and some pretty awesome dance parties. We heard from Student Government Association, discussed diversity, and learned about the academic integrity policy on campus. The highlights, however, are always the trip into Boston and our afternoon of service when the entire freshman class, the Peer Mentors, and faculty went "Into the Streets" to make a difference in our surrounding communities. Here are a couple pictures highlighting Fall Orientation:

Orientation came to a close and the academic year began with Academic Convocation. The senior and freshman classes were honored and welcomed, and Professor Mary-Joan Leith was honored with the Louise F. Hegarty Award for Excellence in teaching. Here is a picture of me with my roommate and some of my suitemates, plus our friend Kait who I am sure will be visiting a lot this year, outside the Sports Complex after convocation.

Sea Shells and Wedding Bells

2009-08-16T15:06:00.000-07:00

This past week was vacation week! My family and I spent a week on Cape Cod, and then came home for my cousin's wedding. It was a week filled with family and fun.

My family and I went camping in North Truro for five days. Each day we spent some time on the beach (even when the weather was cloudy and cool at the end of the week we still went to the beach for a little while)! Maybe that was partly due to the fact that we were staying at a campground where the beach was only about a 15 minute walk through the woods. Plus, the beach we went to was beautiful with its really impressive dunes. Here are some pictures from the beach:

While we were on the Cape, we also did some sightseeing. We went into town in Provincetown, Wellfleet, and Chatham. We went to the harbors and walked around all the little shops. We had a great dinner on the water in Provincetown, and got some yummy seafood at a popular place called Moby Dick's in Wellfleet. We went to the lighthouse in North Truro, and climbed up to the top. Here are a couple pictures of the lighthouse and the view from the top:

My favorite part of our sightseeing however was our tour of the Truro Vineyard. I thought it was really neat to get to walk out through the grape vines, learn about the process of growing grapes and making wine, and see where the wine is fermented and bottled. Of course, we also bought a bottle of Chardonnay to go with dinner! It's really neat that the grapes were grown and the wine was fermented all at the winery that we visited.
Unlike with most vacations, I was actually excited to come home at the end of the week...because I knew that on Saturday it was my cousin's wedding! My cousin Jason married Monica at her church in Worcester. The reception was held at the Wachusett Village Inn. It was a VERY hot day! But we all survived the sweltering wedding service, and made it to the air conditioned, and brand new, reception room in one piece! And the day was well worth the heat, everything was so beautiful! The food was delicious, and I was so hungry, I felt like I ate so much! We had cheese and crackers, hot appetizers, a fruit appetizer before dinner, salad, fillet and lobster or chicken for an entree, and a delicious chocolate and raspberry cake and ice cream. I had a lot of fun dancing with my cousins, aunts and uncles, and parents. My family also stayed at the Inn, so at the end of the night we could go to the after party in the bar rather than having to drive home. Here are some pictures of the beautiful bride and groom and their wonderful wedding:

My sister and I with our cousin Amanda (bridesmaid and sister of the groom) and the newest addition to the Charest family, Cameron (the groom's nephew). Isn't he cute?!

The whole fam.

Now I have one week left of summer!! I can't believe it! I move back in at Stonehill in just one week for training and preparation for Fall Orientation the following weekend! Can't wait to see everyone back on campus!

Summer School

2009-08-05T16:23:00.000-07:00

This summer I had a job that gave me, as an Elementary Education major, perfect experience for my future career in education. I was a one-on-one aide for an energetic seven-year-old in the special education summer school program at my old elementary school. The program ran just four mornings a week, for five weeks. Although it was a short program, I grew close to all of the students in my classroom, and especially the student I was working with.

During summer school, we did small projects, such as painting birdhouses and making flowers out of coffee filters, went outside for recess, and worked with physical therapists, occupational therapists, and speech pathologists. I also did ABA, or Applied Behavior Analysis, one-on-one with my student. ABA involves setting up an environment in order to elicit a desired response, often with a reinforcer (I used M&M's), in order to teach skills. With my student we worked on skills such as matching colors, grasping and releasing objects, maintaining attention, and communicating with gestures, communication boards, and other speech devices. My favorite part of each week was music therapy. A music therapist came into our class once a week to sing songs and give the students a chance to play some instruments. The students, as well as all of the teachers, always enjoyed this part of the week.

I am starting to think more about my plans for next year, after graduating from Stonehill. I have some possibilities in mind. I may find a teaching job and starting work on my Master's in a couple years, or there are some service teaching programs that I am interested in that would allow me to teach and work on my Master's at the same time. My experience this summer however, has me thinking more about the possibility of going into special education. It seems crazy that I will already be applying for more school and a real job so soon! Most importantly, right now it's time for me to take the GREs!!!

One of the other perks of my summer job this year was that I still had time to spend weekends with friends and do lots of summer things! This past weekend my roommate, Carrie, came to visit me. We went to the beach, had a cookout and campfire with my friends from home, AND went to the Taylor Swift and Keith Urban concert at the TD Banknorth Garden! Here's a picture of the concert goers in Boston and a couple pictures of the concert:

Weekend Getaways: Boston and Lake George

2009-07-16T18:05:00.000-07:00

Over the past couple of weeks, I have certainly had my fair share of mini-vacations. For the Fourth of July, I went with my family into Boston to enjoy the Boston Pops and the fireworks over the Charles. Then this past weekend, I traveled with two of my Stonehill friends, Kait and Kathleen, to visit our friend Carrie, who is my roommate next year, in her hometown of Queensbury, New York.

But let's first start with my family's trip to Boston. Even though we only live an hour from Boston, we have never gone into the city for the famous 4th of July celebration before. It was something I have always wanted to do, so it was definitely the year for us to go! We spent all day on the 4th walking around the city. We ate lunch in Quincy Market, walked through Boston Common and the Public Gardens, and enjoyed the atmosphere by the harbor where we stayed at the Marriot Long Wharf. Here's a picture of my sister, Lindsay, and I at lunch at Ned Devines and my mom, my sister, and I at the Swan Pond.

That night we headed over to the Esplanade to find a spot to sit and listen to the Pops perform with Neil Diamond and watch the fireworks. The best way to describe what it was like down by the Hatch Shell is...crowded. There were so many people! We got there comparatively late, and because there were so many people, so we were lucky to get a pretty good spot where we could see the fireworks in between the trees. Here's a couple pictures of our place to sit and the fireworks:
This past weekend was the second annual trip to Queensbury, which is only about twenty minutes from Lake George - somewhere I used to love to travel to with my family for camping trips. I really enjoy returning. On Friday afternoon, we all relaxed by Carrie's pool, then had a delicious dinner that Carrie's mom cooked for us, and then went to Carrie's friend's house for a bonfire. On Saturday, we were all a little adventurous when we hiked out along the edge of Lake George to get to Calves Pen, our location for cliff jumping! I really enjoyed the hike, but I only jumped from the lowest rock into the lake once we arrived at our location. I didn't mind the jump, but the water was very choppy because of impending storms. Here are some pictures of hiking, Lake George, Calves Pen, and cliff jumping. The first is the first official senior year roommate picture of Carrie and I!

We were lucky enough to get a ride on a boat from some friendly people on the lake rather than having to hike back out of the woods. The hike that took us over an hour we covered in a couple minutes by boat! This was great, but unfortunately, in order for us to get out to the boats, everything - towels, shoes, clothes, and food - got soaked!

Hiking, swimming, and jumping was very tiring, so by the end of the day, we were starved, so we went out for Mexican food and ice cream in Lake George. It was all very yummy! Then all day Sunday we ate too! We went out for a big breakfast at The Silo, where Carrie's friend works, and where you can also find the best fudge! So of course, I got some fudge to bring home! Then, to get home we had to drive right past Kathleen's home town of Clifton Park, so we stopped at her house where her dad made us pizza and salad for lunch. By the time I was home, my stomach was full of good food, and my mind was full of good times with friends.

Kathleen, Kait, me, and Carrie (left to right) before going out for Mexican.

So that's what I have been up to during my weekends, check back soon for an update of what I have been up to during my weeks: working at summer school!

OrientatiOn 2OO9

2009-07-01T18:02:00.000-07:00

That's right, Summer Orientation for Stonehill's largest class ever has come and gone. Last week, over two sessions, the Peer Mentor Team welcomed over 700 students (and their families) that make up the Class of 2013. Despite the unseasonably strange rainy weather, everything went smoothly and everyone had a great time. This year I was an assistant coordinator for the program, so I had the opportunity to observe the overall picture of Orientation.

As always we had an overly energetic, enthusiastic, and excited fabulous group of Peer Mentors. Take a look at the Peer Mentors welcoming the incoming students - with balloons, posters, and the traditional Stonehill cheer.

During Summer Orientation, all of the incoming students are a part of smaller groups of about 13 students lead by two or three Peer Mentors. Together the groups go to panels and informational sessions with Campus Ministry, Residence Life, Academics, and Community Standards. The students also spend a lot of time in their groups with Peer Mentors meeting new people, asking questions, and bonding with new friends.

Students also have the opportunity to meet with advisers to get their courses approved and have their ID pictures taken for their Hill Cards (which has both our meal plan account and our Hill Card account - which is like a debit card that we can use at the Information Desk, vending machines, the bookstore, Bertucci's, and CVS). The students also attended a classroom experience. Next year the entire college will be involved in examining what Socrates meant by "The examined life is not worth living." Astra Taylor has directed a documentary entitled "The Examined Life" which interviews several philosophers on the topic of the examined life. The classroom experience during this year's Summer Orientation focused on the examined life. In the fall, we will host viewings of the film, Astra Taylor will be speaking on campus, and there will be a series of lectures on the same topic.

Orientation '09 was not without a couple of our favorite sessions that we have had for several years now. The first is called Playfair. There is no way to describe it other than as a huge meet and greet. The Peer Mentors and the freshmen all run around usually outside on the football field, but sometimes, like on Tuesday, we hold Playfair inside Merkert Gymnasium because of the rain. The mingling and get-to-know-you activities that Newton (our favorite Playfair facilitator) leads us in are just a whole lot of fun.

Another of the favorite Summer Orientation activities is listening to Michael Miller. Michael is a friendly face to Stonehill. He worked for a short time in our Student Activities, which is the office from which Orientation comes from, so some of the Peer Mentors have known him well over the past couple years. Michael travels around the country using his undying energy and humor to teach people how to get what they want out of their lives. Michael spoke this year to the parents as well as the students, and everyone really enjoyed his sessions.

Overall, Orientation was a blast. It was my third year participating in Orientation as a part of the Peer Mentor Team, not to mention my own Orientation! Orientation is special for the Peer Mentors every year in many ways. Not only do we get to give back to Stonehill through being role models for the incoming students, we also become friends with each year's incoming students, and nothing can compare to the strong bond that forms between the members of the Peer Mentor Team as we train and prepare from January to June. I am so glad to have been involved in Orientation during my time at Stonehill. Some of my closest friends and dearest memories are from my four years of Orientation. Luckily, it's not over quite yet because we still have Fall Orientation and a whole year to spend together!

The Orientation Coordinator, Christine, (right), and the Assistants, Katrina and I.

This year's senior Peer Mentors. We now officially have one year to go!

Summer's in Full Swing

2009-06-15T14:07:00.000-07:00

Already this summer, I have had some highs and lows as well as time to work and time to relax. One of my lows was that I had graft surgery. I had receeding gums, so they had to cut some gum from the roof of my mouth and reattach it to my gums were the gum line was too low. This was my first surgery ever! It was also the first time I have had stitches; so needless to say, I was nervous about it! I appreciated the Valium they gave me to relax, and while I felt some of the needles, the pain during the following week wasn’t too bad. However, my chin did bruise pretty badly. But now my gums, while a little swollen at first, are already starting to look better!

While surgery is never pleasant, it did give me an excuse to relax a bit. I got to finally sleep a lot, read, and watch some movies. But now since two days off for surgery, I have substituted every day at my old elementary school.

I have had a couple tough days with some really talkative classes that make me want to run for the hills. But for the most part, when the students are cooperative, I have truly enjoyed teaching. Now I am looking forward to having my own classroom, which would help eliminate some of the disrespectful talking that is nearly impossible to avoid as a substitute. Luckily, I will have a chance to get to know one classroom really well in the fall when I student teach! I had been waiting for a couple months to receive my MTEL scores, and finally, I heard back that I passed! I was so excited and relieved. Since receiving my scores, I have also received my placement for student teaching. I will be teaching in a first grade classroom in Mansfield. I am really excited to learn a lot more about teaching! This was definitely one of the highs of the summer so far!

Another exciting part of my summer is that I got a new car! I love my new car, a 2004 Dodge Stratus. I have to admit, it’s pretty sharp looking! Here’s a picture:

Having a new car has made getting to work each day a lot easier than having to coordinate sharing cars with my family. But even though I have worked a lot so far this summer, I have also had a chance to go to parties and do other fun things on the weekends. Two weekends ago I went to my cousin’s fiancé’s bridal shower, and two graduation parties. This past Friday, my boyfriend, Matt, visited. We went to see Angels & Demons and then over to my friend’s house for a party for her 22^nd birthday. Matt met all of my friends from home for the first time! Then, on Saturday night, I went with my sister and two of her friends to Providence. We did some shopping, ate at Dave & Buster’s, and then we walked around at water-fire. Water-fire is exactly what it sounds like. They light fires on the water. It was a beautiful night and there were so many people walking around along the edge of the water just enjoying the atmosphere. It was the first time that it truly felt like summer to me! Here are a couple pictures of our trip to see the water-fire:

Tomorrow, if you can believe it, I am going back to Stonehill for the next two weeks for Orientation. That’s right, this week the Peer Mentors will be getting everything ready to welcome a class of 710 incoming freshman next week! Check back at the end of next week for my Orientation update!

Happy Summer!

2009-05-27T18:04:00.000-07:00

I can’t believe I have already been home and on vacation for over two weeks! And what a couple of weeks it has been! I got home Friday May 8, but as soon as I got home, I still had to finish the final paper for my Critical Theory class. So besides celebrating Mother’s Day at both of my grandmothers’ houses, I spent the weekend finishing my paper. But the hard work was definitely worth it because I got my grades back already and I am very happy with how I did!

After finishing my school work, I started real life kind of work. Right now I am substituting at the schools in my hometown. I have substituted in grades 1, 3, 4, and at the high school! I have been the classroom teacher, a classroom aid, a one-on-one assistant, and even the art teacher! Out of the 12 school days that I have been home for, I have subbed 9 full days! I have also taken two trips back to Stonehill for the Board of Trustees dinner and for the Board of Fellows, which elects the Trustees, meeting. I just can’t stay away from Stonehill apparently!

In addition to all of this and unpacking, my sister and I were also rushing to pull together the surprise 25^th wedding anniversary party that we had been planning for my parents since January! We had to buy all the groceries and drinks we needed and hide them at neighbors’ houses, cook, clean, go shopping for paper goods and decorations, and pick up the cake. Luckily, my sister was able to do a lot of these things while I was working at school on Thursday and Friday. Plus, we had some help from my grandma and some other family and friends.

The party turned out to be a huge success! My parents were surprised, even though it was difficult to devise a way to get them out of the house, and all of our guests seemed to have a great time! My sister and I successfully hosted our first party – thanks to the assistance of our wonderful family and friends of course!

My mom and dad were both surprised and excited to have a party waiting for them at home!

Cutting the cake!

It's their party...and they'll DANCE if they want to!

This past weekend, my family and I went camping in North Stonington, CT. It is in the southeastern most part of Connecticut, right near Foxwoods and Mystic. I love to go camping with my family. We always have since I was about 5 or 6 years old, and often going on several weekend trips each year! Unfortunately, we got rain, but we also had warm sunny afternoons, and I got to roast marshmallows on the campfire. And to be honest, I don’t mind a little bit of rain when we are camping, because I love the sound of rain on the roof of our camper! My sister, mom, and I also went to Watch Hill to do some shopping and sightseeing. I remember going to Watch Hill, with the merry-go-round where you can catch rings to win a free ride, as a girl. It was nice to walk around, and although I wasn’t willing to spend any money, to do some shopping.

My sister, Lindsay, and I in Watch Hill, RI.

I have done so much already and it has only been a couple weeks; I’m sure I will have lots more stories to share all summer. After all, this is my last real summer…as a student and not as a full time worker I mean! I will be blogging all summer, so be sure to check for updates on what I am up to during the summer, as well as updates on this past semester!

My Life Update

2009-03-25T18:47:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone! Long time no speak! It’s about time that I give you all a life update, because a LOT has been going on in my life! (By the way, just so you know, I am putting off reading because this blog is long overdue! Although I think my Critical Theory Professor will be particularly upset if I don’t finish reading Jacques Derrida’s essay, because Derrida is her “soulmate” even though he never knew it. For those of you like me who have not heard of Derrida before, he is a philosopher whose work was revolutionary for the field of theory.)

Anyway, here’s my Top Five for the semester thus far (and then I’ll give you more details later!)

1) I am an assistant coordinator for the Orientation Program, and our Peer Mentor Team training has gotten off to a great start with a retreat, team dinners, and one of three training days!

2) I am currently President of the Class of 2010, and we have put on a couple events so far this semester: we hosted Improv Asylum (a comedy group from Boston) on campus, sold Class of 2010 sweatshirts, and decorated green t-shirts for St. Patty’s Day.

3) I ran for President of the Student Government Association Executive Board and lost. :( It was one of the most challenging experiences and times I have had here at Stonehill…but more on that later. For now, I will just say I am giving it another go and running to continue as Class President! Campaigning starts tomorrow and elections are next week!

4) I am dating someone! :) It’s a funny story actually, because he was in my Orientation Group two summers ago, and we have been friends since, and now we are dating! That’s kind of how Stonehill is! Here is a picture of Matt and I:

5) General Life: I took the final MTEL (hopefully I passed so I can student teach in the fall), registration for fall classes, planning housing for next year (I am hoping to live in Notre Dame du Lac with my friend, Carrie, who also wants to student teach in the fall), looking for a summer job (I would like to teach at the summer school in my hometown), writing scholarships applications…oh yeah, and then there’s this little thing called going to classes and doing my homework!

That’s my life right now in a nutshell…organized chaos! Check back soon for updates on my top three! They’ll be up soon…I promise!

January Highlights

2009-02-05T20:01:00.000-08:00

It has been a couple of non-stop weeks. I have been so busy in fact that it I can’t believe that I have already been back on campus for a month! I have to explain though, that my business really comes by choice. Half of my work, of course, has been for my classes, but the things that are taking up the other half of my time are the leadership positions that I have on campus. As Class President, Assistant Coordinator for the Orientation Program, and Student Ambassador Coordinator, I have my plate full of meetings and work for these programs. But to me, doing things for these positions really isn’t work. I love all three of these programs, and love that I have been able to get so involved as a student leader on campus. I wouldn’t have it any other way!

Thinking back over what has been going on, there are definitely some highlights! Here’s a recap:

1) Study Abroad Welcome Back Reception – As soon as we were all settled in after the first week, the Office of Career Services and Study Abroad hosted a reception for students returning to campus from international and domestic study and internship experiences. They had pizza for us and we all got a t-shirt…which you’ve gotta love! They instigated conversations between all us about our experiences, and got us thinking about how we have grown from the experience…and about how to put the experience on our resume and really sell ourselves to future employers!

2) Board of Trustees dinner and tour of the New Science Center – I am a member of the Board of Fellows, which is the board that elects the Board of Trustees (who make all the calls for the College). It’s a really exciting position, and definitely has its perks! When the Board of Trustees come to campus for their couple days of meetings a couple times each year, we (myself and the other student representative) get invited to their fancy dinners. This time it was extra special because we got a tour of the new Science Center! My science major friends were pretty jealous, but now I can report. The building looks great! It’s really big, with separate floors for the various science majors, and this really huge open space that is all glass in the front and will be used for large events (dinners and presentations, etc.) It’s a really nice space. Plus, I can now give you the official word that there will be a Dunkin Donuts in the Science Center! I saw the place where it’s going! The building is all set to be done on April 1, and then after that and through the summer, we will be bringing in desks and materials, so it will be ready to go in the fall! Here is a couple pictures of the inside and outside of the main atrium:

3) Roommate Bonding – I have been really pleased to find that so far, living in a quad has been great! I always have friends around, and we are all getting along. Besides sometimes having very different schedules, as long as we are respectful of each other it will continue to be great! On our second weekend back we especially got to bond as roommates. I started calling us the “Corr Quaders” – I think I may be the only one who found this amusing though! Here’s a picture of me and my beautiful roommates, Ronni, Dana, and Heather:

4) My first day at my pre-practicum – For my Curriculum and Methods class this semester, I have my first long-time observation in a classroom. I will be spending a full day in a fourth grade gifted and talented classroom each Friday. The students are so intelligent, are excited about learning, and are really well behaved too! I am mostly observing and then just helping the teacher out by assisting the students. I will also be teaching a small group lesson and a whole class lesson. I am really excited because this is my first chance to put what I have been learning to work in the classroom. It will also, along with student teaching next year, be the things most likely to help me learn to be a great teacher.

5) Student Ambassador Interviews – This time of year is the time that applications come out for virtually every leadership position on campus. It is now the middle of the process for applying for the Orientation Team, to become an RA (Resident Assistant), to be an ALANA Mentor, a Crossings Minister, and to be a Student Ambassador! I have been involved in the process for a couple of these positions. The first is Student Ambassador (i.e. the best tour guides on the planet)! I have spent five morning over the past week interviewing our huge pool of applicants. It will be tough competition to get some really great new recruits who we can teach how to walk backwards!

6) Group Activity Day – The other thing that I have been involved in is of course creating the Orientation Team. The process for applying to be a Peer Mentor is more similar to applying to be an RA, because in addition to interviews, the new applicants also participate in a full morning of activities so we can observe their leadership and teamwork skills. We had three break-out rotations, an egg-drop, a group consensus activity, and a partner activity. My job was to organize and then facilitate the partner activity. We had students work in pairs in a communication activity. Here are a couple pictures of the activity taking place:

Saturday afternoon I worked with the Student Activities staff and the other student coordinators to interview the applicants. It was a very long day to say the least, but it went really well and I really enjoyed it! We have a lot of really talented applicants and we now have some very difficult decisions ahead of us!

7) Developing my resume and cover letter – I know that I want to apply for a summer internship this year; something that will connect to my majors and give me a great learning experience for potential future careers. Some of my interests are applying for publishing companies, specifically education publishers (which is the perfect combo of my Education and English majors), possibly event planning/Public Relations, Communications at National Grid, and my career counselor in Career Services I also look into a position at the John F. Kennedy Library. I met with my counselor this week for her help in reformatting my resume and explaining just how to go about writing my first cover letter.

8) Barefoot Truth Concert – Last night in The Hill, the Programming Committee brought the band Barefoot Truth to campus to perform. I really enjoyed their music! It was a little bit of everything – some country twang (with a harmonica), but also a little bit of a Marley feel. I liked it! They also had lots and lots of different instruments, even a didjeridu!

Time for me to get some sleep before my placement tomorrow! Have a great weekend!

Back at the Hill…for the Sixth Time Around!

2009-01-18T12:48:00.001-08:00

It was surreal to be abroad, and now it is surreal to be back at Stonehill, especially to think that I only have a couple semesters left! I get really excited thinking about how Stonehill sends students all over the world…just in my room alone, my roommates and I studied in England, Scotland, Greece, and Australia and traveled also to Wales, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, Germany, and the Czech Republic! I also have friends who have gone or are going to Chile, Japan, and South Africa. But right now we are all together at the Hill, swapping stories and getting reacquainted. How awesome is that?!

We came back really early it seems this semester, and I would have liked another week at home spending time with my family. However, I was so excited to be reunited with my friends this week, and being back at Stonehill is kind of like nothing has changed. And now in one short week I feel like I have never left. Sure, there are lots of stories and changes to be caught up with…but it’s the same old place with all the people I love!

I loved seeing so many friends all week long and especially this weekend! Friday, I went with my friend Kait into Boston to meet some other friends for one friend’s 21^st birthday. Here is a picture of my self with (right to left) Alexia, Carrie (who are both leaving me for Florence this semester!), and Colleen, who is Carrie’s friend from home.

Then on returning to campus, I saw lots of other friends, mainly friends from last year’s Orientation Team. But my favorite part of the night was at the end of the night when my three roommates and I spent some time together and had some serious roommate bonding!

I have of course had to adjust to living with roommates again, and as you all know, in a quad in the underclassmen dorm, Corr Hall. We did find out that we are being compensated $500 each for being placed in the forced quad in a converted study room, which is something. And now that we have settled in, I am not minding the situation as much as I thought I might. Corr is a fairly new and really nice building to live in, and because we are in converted study room, our room is actually really large, we have a lot of floor space, and you might even forget that there are four of us living in here! Here are some pictures of our room:

Last night was our Inaugural Ball in the Sports Complex, a semi-formal dance complete with appetizers, a raffle for a new TV, good music, and pictures with President-elect Obama! Here is a picture of my friends Christine, this year’s student Orientation Coordinator and Katrina and myself, the Assistant Orientation Coordinators:

The most difficult part for me readjusting to Stonehill so far is that I have classes. Since I had tutorials at Oxford, until Monday I hadn’t been in a class in over eight months! I really liked having all my time open to my own schedule. I have the self discipline required to motivate yourself to work at Oxford, so I really enjoyed the independence I had there. And independence is what going abroad really is all about for a lot of students! This semester it is strange to have five classes, as well as at least three meetings and office hours each week for Student Government Association (I am the president of my class because last semester’s president is studying abroad this semester), the Student Ambassador (tour guide) Program, and of course planning for this year’s Orientation Program for all you prospective Stonehillers out there! That’s right; we are already in the midst of hiring this year’s Orientation Team!

This semester I am taking three education classes: Assessment and Analysis, Curriculum Methods, and Classroom Management, and for Curriculum, every Friday I will be observing a fourth grade classroom in Brockton and also teaching a couple lessons! I am really excited that I think this semester’s education classes will really help me prepare for student teaching next year, and teaching in two years! (How scary is that?!) I am also taking Critical Theory, which is an English major requirement that covers many different theories for approaches to reading literature. It is definitely going to be a challenging course, but I really like my professor, Professor Scheible, and it seems like the class, which only has 15 students, is going to be like one big discussion that allows us to work through the theory texts we are reading together, with lots of questions from us and Professor Scheible’s help. Critical Theory is going to be abstract, and so is my fifth class. We have a moral inquiry requirement as a part of our general education requirements at Stonehill, so I am taking an ethics class in the Philosophy department, called Introduction to Moral Reasoning.

Speaking of classes, even though I ended up with a four day weekend this weekend, I still have started much of my homework. Time for reading!

Home for the Holidays

2009-01-05T19:36:00.000-08:00

I have been home for just over two weeks now, and they have been full of holiday celebrations. The day I got home, I slept only for a bit so that I could start to get over the jet lag. Then I went to my grandma’s house to bake Christmas cookies. I collapsed and took a nap before going to my friend’s house for our annual Christmas party that we have been having since seventh grade.

Over the next few days, I slept about 12 hours a day, I rushed to get my presents wrapped, and helped my mom get ready to host Christmas day. On Christmas Eve we went to visit my Papa in his nursing home, went to church, and went to my Aunt’s house for dinner. Here is a picture of my sister and I on Christmas Eve in front of the tree at my house:

Family came to our house on Christmas day. It was really strange that my mom was hosting for the first time, when we always go one of my grandmas’ houses for Christmas day. But me and all my cousins are getting older, and the next generation is soon to arrive. My oldest cousin is expecting his first son in June, his brother is getting married in August, and another cousin got engaged on Christmas morning! It is strange that our generation is bridging the gap into the next stage of our lives. It was a very nice Christmas day though. It was relaxing to stay home, my mom cooked a delicious prime rib, and my dad light a fire.

A couple days later we hosted another Christmas party at our house, this time just for the aunts, uncles, and cousins on my dad’s side of the family, so everyone got to see the family they didn’t see on Christmas Eve or day. We watched the Pats game and ordered Chinese food (and ate almost all of it!)

The next thing I knew it was New Year’s Eve and there was unnecessary drama among my friends about where we were going to celebrate. I was always going to go to my best friend, Tessa’s, boyfriend’s house, and eventually some of my other friends were able to come as well, which I was very happy about. It is nice that even though sometimes it seems like my friends from home are growing distant, we can still get together to visit.

The final holiday gathering of the year was this Saturday. Everyone on my mom’s side of the family, including my mom’s aunt and uncle and all my second cousins, got together to see everyone we hadn’t yet during the holiday. It is also one of the few times I see all my second cousins each year.

During the week I also got to go out with a couple friends, go shopping, and I also went with my family to Wrentham shopping outlets and then to Patriot’s Place for dinner at CBS Scene. Here are Lindsay and I in front of the Pro Shop, and my dad and I at dinner:

While I was at dinner, I heard from my friend Heather about our rooming assignment for the spring semester, and let me tell you, it is enough to make me want to go back to Oxford. I am living in Corr Hall, an underclassmen dorm, in a quad. First of all, there are virtually no juniors who ever have to live in quads, and none who involuntarily must live in an underclassmen building. And I can’t lie, I was upset about this situation. There were 30 junior girls returning from a semester abroad who Stonehill did not have beds for. The one good thing about the situation is that Stonehill guarantees housing for all four years, so at least the 30 of us still have a room to move into this weekend, even if it is not what any of us were expecting. The bad part of the situation is that it is going to make the transition back to Stonehill much more difficult. I was excited to be living among my friends again, and eager to become close to them again. This semester, I also have a full day of student teaching every week, and I am really nervous about being able to get to bed early enough every Thursday night so I can get enough rest before this important part of my class. I was also excited to come home and be 21, and even if not in a wet residence hall, I was thinking I would still be with other friends my age. Finally, I was living in a single at Oxford, with my own bathroom. I’m not sure I am prepared to share a room with 3 roommates and a bathroom with 30 girls.

Residence Life very slyly sent out the housing assignments at quarter of five on December 30; right before a snow storm, and New Years. Finally, on Friday, I spoke with an RD, who informed me that no decisions have been made about any compensation that will be given to us, like they compensate freshmen who are living in forced triples. I surely hope they will because this situation is going to make it a challenging semester for many of us. If nothing else, this situation shows just how much we need the new upperclassmen residence hall that is supposed to be opened in the fall of 2010!

Now that I am home after being abroad, I was wondering what the re-entry and reverse culture shock was going to be like. What I am feeling is that being home is like being back to reality. I absolutely worked my butt off at Oxford, but living in a different country was like vacation from real life. While abroad, I learned a lot and took my studies as seriously as I do at home, but I was only there for a couple months. I wasn’t focused on everything that I will now be dealing with over the next two years. Now that I am home, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I applied for a job on campus for next summer, and because I was dedicated to that job, and fairly confident I had a chance of getting it, I turned down two other offers for work doing research with the SURE program on campus. But I didn’t get the job I applied for, and now it is too late for the other jobs. Now I am home and facing the harsh reality of the economy and the need to find a good summer job. My ideal job would be to have a paid internship with a children’s book publisher, but there’s not much in Massachusetts for publishers, and even less for paid summer internships. I only have a year and a half left at Stonehill, that means one semester of student teaching and two of classes. I am now thinking about getting a summer job that will be a step forward and a good experience for future employment.

In the mean time, until the semester gets under way and some of these things start to take shape, I am really excited to be back at Stonehill. It has been way too long since I have been there. I can’t wait to see all my friends, and to settle back into my life there.

Tour of Italy

2009-01-05T18:44:00.000-08:00

After my week in Thessaloniki, my friend Heather and I flew from Thessaloniki to Athens, Athens to Rome, and finally Rome to Venice…to begin our tour of Italy! And somehow, I was too excited once I was in Italy to be too tired! I couldn’t believe I was in Italy, and to be honest, I’m still not sure that I believe that I was in England, Switzerland, Greece, OR Italy! As soon as Heather and I got off the bus on the main island, right next to the Grand Canal, we were SO excited! It was beautiful! This is what we saw:

We started being all tourist-y and American…being loud and taking pictures. We set to work following the instructions from our hostel about how to get there. We had to take the water bus, walk across the Rialto, and along all these small alleys to find it. It was exhausting, especially while dragging luggage, but we made it, and then set out to find Heather’s friend Julie. We spent a few hours looking for her and trying to call her, and could NOT find her! I think that is when the exhaustion hit me! Eventually, we found her at the hostel, and then went right to bed. We got a good night’s sleep so we could have a full day the next day. And we sure did! How we did most of our sightseeing, especially in Venice, was just wandering around, picking a way, and walking around until we hit a dead end. Then we took the water bus to Murano, the island famous for its glass. We wandered around the island and shopped for glass jewelry, which made great gifts for my mom and sister for Christmas. We took the typical pictures of us on the Rialto, and also saw many beautiful parts of Venice:

At this time of year, it is the rainy season in Italy, and Venice gets flooded by the aqua alta. Two weeks before we arrived in Venice, the city was the most flooded it had been in a couple decades. But we lucked out and only ran into a couple problems. When the tide came in in the morning, we walked through San Marco Piazza, and the plaza was covered with a foot of water. It was really neat to see though because they set up these foot bridges so everyone doesn’t have to walk through the water. Then, when we got off the water bus dock on Murano, we walked right into six inches of water, luckily, Heather and I bought rain boots to wear as soon as we arrived in Venice! Below is a view of San Marco at high tide, and below that is low tide:

The next morning we took the train to Florence, and began our tour of the next city. My favorite things in Florence were seeing El Duomo, which is the largest church I’ve ever been in. Here is a picture of its beautiful façade:

I also liked seeing the Ponte Vecchio. After Venice, being in Florence was a kind of a shock…because they have roads, cars and mopeds there! The Ponte Vecchio was very pretty.

That night we climbed up to the Piazza del Michaelangelo and had a beautiful view over Florence:

We went into a couple museums, but my favorite thing to see was the Statue of David. It is very tall, and much more impressive and graceful than any copies or pictures show it to be. In Florence, we also got to meet up with another friend from Stonehill studying there, in between his finals. He actually tracked us down, checking every major tourist attraction, because I gave him the wrong numbers for my mobile phone. Sorry again about that Brendan!

From Florence, we took a train to Pisa, just for a couple hours so we could see the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It was only an hour away, and we figured, we were there, we might as well go! We were told the tower was right near the train station, but it was not, we had to walk through the town in order to get there. But that way we saw they city as well as the tower! And of course we took the typical pictures of us pushing up the tower.

Our final destination in Italy was Rome, and I think besides the beauty of Venice, this was my favorite city, because there was so much to see! We got there late on Tuesday night, and met Heather and Julie’s friend Mallory. On our first day in Rome we decided to go to Vatican City. We took the metro there, and as soon as we got off, people started trying to sell us tickets to see the Pope and have a tour guide take us through the Vatican museum and the Sistine Chapel. At first we refused, but eventually we realized that we didn’t know where to go or what to do, and decided that it would be worth it to take advantage of it. I was pretty excited about getting to see the Pope, but I was the only one out of the four of us who is Catholic. Pope Benedict spoke first in Italian, then Spanish, then French, and finally he was beginning to speak in English when we had to leave to go meet our tour group.

Here I am in front of St. Peter's Basilica:

The tour turned out to be really entertaining and informative. Our tour guide, Stan, looked kind of like George Clooney, and was totally a ladies man. He was speaking in Italian to all the women in the museum that we passed. He was also very knowledgable, and I learned more about Michaelangelo’s fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel than I would have on my own.

That afternoon we walked around Rome, saw the Trevi Fountain (and threw in coins!) and the Spanish steps.

That night we at a restaurant that quickly became my favorite in Italy. While, I was traveling I wanted to fulfill that image in my mind I had of sitting outside and sipping a cappuccino or getting a light lunch. Well, that didn’t exactly happen since it is the winter, but at night many places have heat lamps so that customers can sit outside comfortably even in the cooler weather. So at this restaurant we finally found a cute little place where we could sit outside and have a nice traditional dinner. I had the yummiest bacon and broccoli ravioli. Each night for dinner we would sit down and eat, and we always found some reasonably priced places. We would eat bread with olive oil, share a bottle of wine, and eat lots and lots of pasta. While in Italy we had spaghetti with Bolognese sauce (they don’t really have meatballs that I saw!), lasagna, tortellini, risotto, and gnocchi. We were looking for fettucine alfredo, but we learned that the Italians think alfredo on fettucine. Apparently Olive Garden has it wrong!

On my final day in Italy we saw the ruins: the Coloseum, Roman Forum, and Circus Maximus. I thought this was really cool because I took Latin in high school and I learned about all the things that I was seeing. In high school, I even had to give a mock guided tour of ancient Rome, and now it was like I was on my own tour!

The next day, I was finally heading home…after a completely exhausting two weeks and absolutely fantastic two and a half months! I was really wishing that it had been longer and that I had been able to do more. But I also realized that it was a good thing I wasn’t going to be spending any more money, and Christmas was right around the corner so I was anxious to get home safe to my family for the holiday. Getting home safe was a legitimate concern of mine because there was a snow storm in Boston! To turn the longest day of my life into a short story: I woke up in Rome at 4:30 in the morning, took a taxi to the airport, flew to London, my flight to Boston was delayed about 6 hours, so I spent the day in Heathrow airport. I finally boarded the plane and found my seat in between two little boys (their parents sat in front of them) and a dad holding his baby daughter (his wife and son sat in front of them). Just as we were preparing to take off, the little boy next to me got a bloody nose, so I helped him stop it. Then the baby girl fell asleep with her head in my lap. When I was trying to sleep, my new friend Adam next to me was coughing up a lung. Eight and a half hours, 2 and ¾ movies, and 4 glasses of water later, we were above Boston, and thanks to the storm experiencing turbulence that made my stomach drop. After circling the city twice we began to depart, and had a fairly smooth landing. Then we had to wait 45 minutes on the plane before we were able to get to the gate and depart! It was the longest 45 minutes ever! Next we had to wait at least a half hour for the luggage from our flight to get to baggage claim. By the time I stepped outside, it was after 2 A.M. I then took a van service home (since my family couldn’t come to the airport because of the snow), and my sister, who had been dozing on the couch and my parents, not really sleeping either, greeted me. Not going to lie, we all cried tears of relief and exhaustion.

Riots in Greece

2009-01-05T18:27:00.001-08:00

I am now home, finally over jet lag, and finally done with the rush of the holidays…so I finally have some time to update you all on the past few weeks! As you already know, after leaving Oxford, I went to stay with my friend Heather in Thessaloniki, Greece. Heather is a friend from Stonehill, she is also an Education major and involved in student government, and we are planning on living together this semester when we are both back on campus.

I really enjoyed being in Greece for a couple days. I got to experience quite a few aspects of Heather’s studying abroad program, and now I have a pretty good understanding of what her experience was like. The one thing that held us back a bit were the riots. The first four of five nights I spent in Thessaloniki we just stayed in at Heather’s apartment building. But during the day there was less rioting going on, and we were able to walk around the city. I captured some posted information about the riots, such as meeting times and locations, as below, and some of the devastation of the riots (burned stores, smashed ATMs, and broken windows). For example, the building in the picture below was a Starbucks.

The first full day I was in Thessaloniki we walked up to the old part of the city to see the old city wall. The old city is up the hill behind the center of the modern city, and we were confident there would be no rioters there. There was a great view of the city and the water from the hill:

Heather and I had dinner at sunset in a taverna.

I had my new favorite food: tszatziki (which I know now how to pronounce but do not know how to spell), which is a yogurt with cucumber, dill, and garlic, and the Greeks eat it with bread. We also got fried cheese (like mozzarella sticks), fried zucchini, and chicken. The last night I spent in Thessaloniki, we also went to a tavern, one of Heather’s favorites, where they have the best chicken. That night was an awesome experience because they had a band playing traditional Greek music, and we were the only tourists among all the Greeks doing what they do for dinner all the time. There was even a ten-year -old boy at the table next to us who started dancing to the music. Then his father and grandfather started watching his feet and clapping along with the beat, the next thing you know all the men in the room are clapping along with the beat as he danced.

The next day school was back in session, and we deemed it safe to walk around the city. We did lots of outdoor sightseeing, such as the White Tower, which is the architectural symbol of the city, and is located along the Aegean Sea, and also lots of ruins. It is really neat how the city is built around all the ruins, and the public can just walk through them. I was glad I got to see how beautiful Greece is, with or without riots.

We stopped for gelato and also euros, which are flat bread sandwiches, stuffed with French fries and pretty much whatever else you want. Heather and I kept it simple with tszatziki sauce, chicken, and French fries. Before I left Greece, I also made sure I had a crepe, from Heather’s favorite down the street from her apartment. Nikos, who owned that restaurant, Heather described to me as the mayor of their neighborhood. He was really friendly, and we had a conversation, even though he doesn’t speech much English, and we don’t speak much Greek!

The next day I spent on the campus of the school that Heather attended while she was abroad because Heather had four final exams to take that day! The school was about a twenty minute ride from her apartment, so they have a bus the runs a couple times a day to take everyone to school and back. It was strange to have to prepare for a full day on campus, we packed a brown bag lunch and everything. I just hung around and watched movies and read, but it was cool to get to experience Heather’s school. Then the final day in Greece we had rain! We decided it was the perfect day to go to two of the most popular museums in Thessaloniki, one on the Byzantine empire, and the other more specifically on architecture. But both covered lots of information on the culture of the area throughout history starting back in Roman times. It was neat to see statues of Greek gods and goddesses and other artifacts. The only strange thing was that I almost got kicked out by a guard for hiccupping too loudly! His stern face speaking Greek to me and pointing to the door sure made me stop hiccupping real fast!

Friday night, my last night in Greece, we didn’t get home to Heather’s apartment until 2 A.M., and then we had to leave by taxi to go to the airport at 4:30 A.M. to fly to Italy! So, we decided to not go to bed. That was the first all nighter I have ever pulled! And let me tell you, somewhere between Athens and Rome, around 9 in the morning, that really caught up with me!

Goodbye Oxford...Hello Thessaloniki!

2008-12-09T11:09:00.001-08:00

Before sunrise on Monday morning I left Oxford by bus and flew from Heathrow to Thessaloniki, Greece to visit Heather, my friend from Stonehill. I was very sad to leave Oxford, and I was surprised by the realization that I will not be returning to Oxford anytime soon. My last week in Oxford was a really good one though! I got in the Christmas spirit with Christmas dinner in the dining hall – complete with little toys and paper crowns in our “crackers,” a roaring fire, carols sung by the coed choir, pigs in a blanket, and mince pies! Yum! My last two tutorials went well (although I had a couple really long days and really late nights in order to get all my work done.) We also had Provost’s Collections, which was when each student met with the Provost, the head tutor, and the director for visiting students at Worcester, who happened to be one of my tutors. A statement by each of our tutors about what we did well and what we need to improve on, ending with our British grades converted into American grades, was read aloud to us. All of the visiting students did really well! The week ended with a couple nights out with friends to clubs, and a couple quiet dinner and a movie nights in with American friends after the British students left on Saturday. I got to hang out with my friend Tom one night. Here’s a picture of the two of us:

Tom had just had the Worcester rugby team dinner, and they all had to wear shirts of bad rugby teams, so Tom was sporting a Wales rugby shirt (and then dressed it up…and I think maybe tried to cover it up?!)

I especially enjoyed the final bop put on by the Entz (entertainment) team at Worcester. The theme was cartoons, so everyone went all out for costumes; there were the Incredibles, Smirfs, 101 Dalmations, and more! I was Cinderella, courtesy of a frilly dress from Primark (a store like Target that’s really cheap). Here is a picture of my friend Tom and me in the college bar during the bop:

It was really sad to leave all my new friends…and Oxford. But I am confident I am going to stay in touch with these new friends – and maybe see some of my new American friends back in the States!

So that brings me to where I am now! Heather is studying at the American College of Thessaloniki, and invited me to come and stay with her. I traveled all by myself from London to Thessaloniki (scary…but I’m so proud of myself for being able to do it without any problems!) yesterday, which took all day. Last night we stayed in, we caught up, I met Heather’s friends here, and we watched a movie. I was happy to stay in, but there is another reason that we decided to stay in last night. As you may or may not have seen in the news, there are riots going on, mainly in Athens, but also in Thessaloniki. The Greek college students are rioting against the police, in an attempt to rebel against the government. From my understanding, the rioting has all been instigated by the death of a fifteen year old boy who was shot (after instigation) by a police officer, but many Greeks aren’t happy with the government and thus the rioting has been carried on. There have been lots of tear gas bombs, rioters throwing things at the police from roofs, and today there was a peaceful march that went by while we were in a grocery store. I am separate and safe from the riots where I am staying, but the neighborhood that I am in is down the street from the University where the riots are taking place. The rioters are staying on the university campus because the police legally cannot enter their campus. So we just need to stay away from that area. But sadly, it is interfering somewhat with my ability to sightsee and enjoy Thessaloniki! Today is the funeral for the young boy in Athens, so we are hoping that things will calm down by the end of the week, and so far, they seem to have already quieted down.

On Saturday morning, Heather and I are traveling to Italy to meet a couple of her friends and do a week of sightseeing in Italy! Our plans are to start in Venice, then go to Florence, and finish in Rome. But, in Venice, there have been really terrible floods…so once again my travel plans may be thrown off! How long we will spend in Venice depends on how the city is by the end of the week.

With all my travels coming up, I won’t be able to be in touch for the next week and a half, but I will be flying home next Friday, December 19^th, and I will update on my Greece and Italy trips then – with lots and lots of pictures!

400 Pages in 48 Hours

2008-12-02T08:59:00.000-08:00

I did it! I had to get 400 pages read in two days in order to get it done before my final Jane Austen tutorial, and I got it read! I’m very proud I finished, with enough time to spare that I could shower and even eat lunch! I read Jane Eyre for my final primary tute, to finish off the term after reading all of Austen’s completed novels. Charlotte Bronte criticized Austen for her writing not including enough passion and emotion, so this final week was a nice comparison to what I have read all term. I don’t know how I did it, but I got through it, and with a comprehension enough to have a pretty good tute too! With today’s tute out of the way, all I have left is my final secondary tute on Shakespeare. I have to finish reading Much Ado About Nothing and write a paper on it…in a little over 24 hours! Eeek!

So why do I have so little time to finish out my last week in Oxford? I’m blaming it on boat club and the Christ Church Regatta! The regatta ran from last Wednesday through Saturday. I knew that my crew would be racing on Wednesday, and I figured since we weren’t very good and haven’t had many outings rowing on the Isis, that we would row once on Thursday and that would be it. But we had some very lucky and strange circumstances that brought us all the way through to the final day on Saturday! Here are pictures of our boat house (Worcester College Boat Club "rows sexy") and from the top of the boat house:

On Wednesday, my whole crew and I were really nervous and really anxious waiting for our race time and watching all the other crews race. Which also means we were watching all the other crews crash, catch crabs (which means your oar gets stuck in the river and you have to lean back and bring it over you to get it our of the water, or you are going to be in the water!), switch lanes, or completely fall into the river! There actually was one boy from a St. Edmund’s Hall crew when they crashed into a boat that was at a dock who fell completely into the water!!!! We did not want that to happen to us! So we got out into our boat and paddled down the river to the starting point, with just a little bit of difficulty, to find out that the crew we were racing against dropped out because their rudder was broken! That means we won automatically!!! We still had to row down the course, and we did ok. It was a good practice. It was a little scary though, because we were going so fast and stroking with as much strength as we could that I felt like I might fall out of the boat or rocket off my seat! I didn’t though!

This was very exciting because of our draw we had a second round bye! So we rowed again on Friday, but once again not against a crew! It was basically another practice. During this race, we were going even faster and I got so exhausted, but we were improving! So we, and one other Worcester crew, the top men’s novice crew, made it through to Saturday. We were again nervous, but really ready to row in an actual race on Saturday morning. The marshal yelled “Attention! GO!!!” and we set off rowed three short strokes and then seven long strokes bringing the pressure and rating up. It was a great start. But suddenly, the next thing I knew, I couldn’t keep rowing because we were too close to the other boat! Then we were about to hit them! We escaped a crash, but somehow both us and our opponent (University College) switched lanes! Sadly, the marshals said it was our fault, and we lost the race, and even though we appealed the ruling, they stuck with it. It’s ok though because Saturday was a lot of fun at the boat house because we had lots of food and drink (which we couldn’t have until after we raced) and music and friends were there to support rowers! Our coaches were proud of us, and that night we got to celebrate at boat club dinner. Boat club dinner is almost THE reason to row, it is a huge party! First we had a black tie dinner in the hall, with the fire going and also port with dessert! Dinner, however, turns into a party, which progresses to the Purple Turtle, the Oxford Union bar. It was a really fun night with all the friends, American and British, that I have made while rowing.

Here is our cox, Azi, helping us get our coach, CJ, excited for our race with pink Worcester war paint!

Above is our boat paddling over to the starting line for Saturday morning's race, and our other coach, Lauren, cheering us on! And below is a close up of Rachel, me, and Charis!

Here's the crew! Still smiling even though we lost :(

Here is we are eating during boat club dinner in the hall!

I’m also blaming my procrastination this weekend on Thanksgiving. The American studying abroad students were invited to the Provost’s Lodgings for dinner. It was black tie, and much more formal than boat club dinner! This dinner was my “turn” to sit next to the provost, who both complimented me and teased me throughout the night! It was a lovely dinner, they did a great job cooking a traditional dinner for us, and we even got seconds, which has never happened here before! We had butternut squash soup to begin (the least traditional item, but they always do soup or salad!), then of course turkey, gravy, potatoes, sweet potatoes, broccoli, corn, carrots, and my new favorite thing – British “pigs in a blanket,” which unlike ours which are often hot dogs wrapped in crust, the Brits wrapped little sausages in bacon! So yummy! Then we had apple pie and port for dessert! Oh yes, in addition to the port, we had a cocktail hour before, were served a white wine during the soup, and then this delicious red wine during dinner. Of course, the provost kindly reminded the wait staff to continue to “top up” our glasses during the meal. The Provost then ended the meal with a speech about how America was a “mistake” going all the way back to Amerigo Vespucci, and right up to how the first Thanksgiving is basically a myth, BUT, he did say that even though we beat them in 1776, we are still welcome! The Brits like to tease us whenever they can!

Here are almost all of the JYAs (American Junior Year Abroad students) after Thanksgiving dinner. The landscape behind us is Worcester's most expensive item that the College owns. Supposedly it cost millions of pounds!

This picture of me and my friend Tiina is one of my favorites!

So, you are going to think that all I do here is eat, but I have now had one Christmas dinner and have another one tonight! On Sunday, a couple students who live in my staircase made us all Christmas dinner, everything from soup to two roast chickens, potatoes, veggies, more pigs in blankets, and even dessert! I was very impressed with the culinary skill! It was also nice to relax with friends in a sort of progressive dinner. We went to one kitchen for soup, another for the meal, and a third for dessert. My other Christmas dinner is tonight in formal hall. Soon I am going to Provost’s Collections, when we each meet with the Provost individually, he tells us and asks us how we did over the term, and then I will be able to go celebrate with another Christmas dinner!

Time to go enjoy the rest of my time in Worcester Winter Wonderland! We actually often sing the famous Christmas carol, just changing the word “winter” for “Worcester!” Go Worcester!

Three Weekends, Four Cities, Zero Time

2008-11-23T14:02:00.000-08:00

Over the past three weekends I have done a lot of traveling and sightseeing. I went to Bath, my parents visited me here in Oxford and we toured the city together, and this past weekend, for my 21^st birthday, I went to Switzerland! These few weekends have been a great time, but since I’ve been doing as much sightseeing as possible on the weekends, during the week I have been working like mad, which means less time for blogging, unfortunately! But I have decided that this has gone on long enough and must change…therefore I am not doing my reading right now so I can write to all my faithful readers! (P.S. Don’t tell my tutors!)

Bath was a lovely city. I was very concerned it was going to rain the whole day, but for this day at least I lucked out and it was a beautiful day! We spent a full day exploring the quaint and pretty town, but our major stops were the Roman Baths, the Pump Room, and the Jane Austen Center. I loved going to the Roman Baths. I studied Latin in high school, so it was great to see what I studied. Plus, I have seen so many pictures that I always wanted to get there and see what it was actually like, and it’s even prettier than I thought it would be! Here are a couple pictures from the Roman Baths:

I explored Bath with other American friends: Prianca, Rebecca, and Margaret, who is a fellow Stonehiller. They all go to different colleges at Oxford.

Right next to the baths is the Pump Room, which is now a restaurant, but was also mentioned in a few of Jane Austen’s novels. It was kind of a social watering hole during the Regency period. The most famous part of the Pump Room, however, is the fountain from which you can still drink the water from the spring! I drank the water…it was warm! So strange! Here I am drinking the water:

Finally, we went to the Jane Austen Center. Austen lived in Bath for five years, and also set two of her novels in Bath. The center was a bit disappointing because it focused mostly on her time in Bath, a city which Austen did not like very much, and on clothing used in film productions. But I was very excited to be in a city that was home to the author I am studying this term.

The next weekend my parents came to visit! I was so excited to see them, and while I made them do some things on their own so I could do some reading, I got to see them each day at least for dinner (which means it was an inexpensive weekend for me!), and got to see more of the city that I hadn’t yet. I showed them around, took them down to see the Isis where I row, went on a bus tour of the city, ate fish and chips, visited the Oxford Castle (which used to be a fort and then a prison until 1996!), and had afternoon tea. I was very excited to show my parents around my most recent home. One of the places we visited on our walking tour of Oxford was Christ Church College, famous because scenes from the Harry Potter films were shot there. And I get in anytime I want since I am a student there!

Above is the Quad at beautiful Christ Church, and below is the hall at Christ Church, the Harry Potter Great Hall!

Finally, this past weekend may have been the most exciting yet! It was the first time I took a trip out of England, and it was the perfect way to make my 21^st birthday memorable! I traveled with my friend, Christine, who is from Stonehill and studying at St. Catz in Oxford, to Geneva. Our trains to the airport were delayed and I got stuck in security (the security guy decided to choose me to pat down and to search my backpack by literally unpacking my backpack), so by the time we made it through the separate shoe check in security, we saw that our gate was closing, and literally ran through the entire airport, without our shoes on, to our gate, which I swear was the furthest one away! We made it just in time! It was stressful at the time, but now we have looked back on it and laughed.

We made it to Geneva to stay with our Stonehill friend Ben, who is doing an internship at the UN. It was so nice to just relax, go to dinner, and walk around Old Town in Geneva with friends from home. The next day we toured Geneva, but it was raining! So we saw as much as we could, but our main stop was a tour of the UN. Here's a picture of the member flags outside the Palace of Nations and one of the front of the building:

That afternoon we traveled by train (a three hour ride!) to Interlaken, the capital of extreme sports. Our reason for going to Interlaken was to go skydiving, but it SNOWED! Because of the weather, we weren’t able to go skydiving. L It was disappointing, because we have been planning this since last spring, and for me, it was exciting that I would be skydiving for my birthday. But it just wasn’t in the cards for us, and it must have been for some reason that we couldn’t go. I think we may have been even too close to making our flight home if we had gone! So despite the disappointment, Interlaken was beautiful! We also met our friends Brooke and Angela from Stonehill, and I was just so happy to be with all these friends to celebrate my birthday! Even though it was different than it would have probably been at home, since the drinking age is 18 here, it was nonetheless a very memorable one! Here are some pictures of the picturesque Swiss Alps and countryside:

This is the view from our hostel balcony when we woke up on Saturday morning. Can you see the mountain? I swear it's there! (Clearly not the best weather for jumping out of a plane!)

See...I told you there was a mountain there!

The Alps basically surround the entire town of Interlaken! Above is a picture of Brooke and Ang and below are Christine and Ben.

Here is the whole Stonehill gang!

On our train ride back to Geneva, we were in awe of the scenery. Here are some of my favorite pictures:

After a trip out of the country, it was so nice to return back to the UK and Oxford. It felt like home! Especially because here they speak English and not French or German! Now I only have two weeks left at Oxford, and it’s going to be another busy two weeks! This week I am looking forward to Christ Church Regatta, Thanksgiving dinner (black tie at the Provost’s Lodgings), and the Boat Club dinner. I’ll update at the end of the week!

The Worcester Trifecta and London Excursion

2008-11-06T12:50:00.000-08:00

Boy, have I got loads to catch you all up on!

Well, first we have got to talk about academics…hey, it’s Oxford after all, right? So in my opinion there are definitely benefits as well as difficulties with the tutorial system. I am really enjoying having only two areas at the most to focus on at one time. It is possible to go more in depth with the novels and plays that I am reading than I have been able to before. It is also really rewarding to focus so much on you topics because you get to see how everything works together. For me, I am seeing Jane Austen’s progression in her writing style and sophistication from her first novel to her last. I am also seeing why Shakespeare’s thoughts behind his plays because I can see similarities in characters, plot, and theme. The toughest part in my opinion is the quick turn around in between papers. This week I had two papers due and my two tutorials both on Tuesday! So as soon as I finished one essay, I had to try to finish the reading for my second tutorial, then I had to finish the other essay, and now that I have finished both essays I began right away on my reading for my paper for Tuesday. It’s just non-stop! I am enjoying meeting with my tutors one-on-one. I don’t often think of tutorials as work because I get to sit around with my tutors, sipping tea or coffee, and discussing literature! Yay! Sometimes though I don’t like the tutorial system, because when your tutor asks you a question and you don’t know the answer, you can’t just wait for someone else to raise their hand, because there is no one else! I have had many times when I have been confused, and gotten tongue tied, thought originally I had a good idea I was trying to communicate, and then mid-sentence I would forget what my good point was! My tutors are really nice though and they don’t get mean or anything. The tutorials are meant to be an exchange of ideas, and the tutors like you to propose thoughts and challenge them just as much as they ask you questions.

Right, so after all that work, I need to work off the stress somehow right? Well, I row! Unfortunately, I haven’t been on the river in two weeks! L We were short a cox one morning and couldn’t go, and this week the river warning has been too high because we had too much rain and the river was too high! But this week instead of rowing on the Isis, I have gotten to work on my skills on the Erg machine, which I found to be much more helpful! My coach was right there explaining to me what she wanted to me to do, rather than yelling at me from the side of the river bank when she is trying to watch all eight of us at once. I felt like I did much better after her instruction, so hopefully we can get our act together as a team, because our first race is in 10 days!

I have to admit that I think I know why I may be finding the work to be non-stop. The past two weekends I have been off campus! Two weekends ago I went on the home stay in Worcester. (Hence why I now have the “Worcester Trifecta.” I am from outside of Worcester, Massachusetts, I am at Worcester College, and now I have been to Worcestershire, England too!) It was relaxing to be able to relax in a home for the weekend. It wasn’t too much of an exciting time, but it was a nice little break. I stayed with Avril, a woman in her sixties originally from Wales who has been living in Worcester for twenty years now, with another student from another college at Oxford. Avril fed us lots of food and gave us even more hot drinks (tea, coffee, chocolate). I think she asked me at least six or seven times each day I was there if I would like a hot drink! Each night we were there we just relaxed and watched a movie, and then I slept in! That was the only time I have slept in the whole time I have been here! The one thing that the program did have planned for us was a tour of the city of Worcester. They have a few claims to fame, like Worcestershire sauce, Worcester Porcelain (it’s really expensive!), John Wesley founded the first Methodist church there, and supposedly Shakespeare had to go there to get his marriage license! I enjoyed walking around the city, and getting to see the place where the name for my hometown comes from. My favorite was the cathedral though! It was beautiful! Here are some pictures from the weekend:

This is an assembly hall in the Worcester Town Hall (a Georgian style building...cerca Jane Austen's time!)

A cute traditional "black and white" style house.

Inside the cathedral...so pretty!

This past weekend I was in London for the London Excursion Weekend put on by my study abroad provider (IFSA-Butler). I had a fabulous time in London! I got to do a lot more sightseeing and actually spend some time at the sights we saw. But my favorite part of the weekend was getting to see friends from Stonehill! There were eight Stonehillers in London for the weekend! Some I have seen at Oxford, but others I hadn’t seen since the end of the spring semester! Friday night I went on the London Eye with a couple of those Stonehill girls and some of their friends from St. Catz (the Oxford college they are at). Here are some pictures from the Eye:

Here are the Stonehill girls on the London Eye!

On Saturday we went to Westminster Abbey (which was my favorite! I loved seeing Poet’s Corner), the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace, the Churchill Museum and the War Cabinet Rooms, and finally the Globe Theater! By the end of the day it was pouring rain! And we had to hurry back to the hotel to change into our Halloween costumes for our Halloween party boat cruise on the Thames! Then on Sunday morning we had a nice big brunch, and I zipped back up to Oxford on the train!

We had to do all the tourist-y things! So here I am at the Harry Potter tourist trap!

Who goes to London without seeing how many people they can fit in a phone booth? Us: 6!

The single Londoner we met at the changing of the guards felt bad that I was short and couldn't see...so he let me sit on this shoulders. Too bad I didn't even get his name!

Here I am with Christine, fellow Stonehill English major, in the Globe! Yay!

On the boat cruise, I got to see Kathleen and Kaitlyn, Stonehill friends studying at the University of Kent.

I also got to see my fellow witch friend (Rebecca from St. Edmund's at Oxford), Sarah Palin (Maria), an angel (Erica), and Joe the Plummer (Tiina) - all Worcesterites with me!

It has been interesting being here in England during the election, and so Maria and Tiina's costumes were quite a hit!

This Saturday I am taking a day trip with a couple friends from other Oxford colleges to Bath. Now that I have seen the Globe, I will get to see the setting for a couple of Austen’s novels! It’s really neat to be where the people I am studying were a couple hundred years ago. So much history in Oxford…and England!

Rowing on the Isis and Other Traditional Oxford Things

2008-10-21T16:31:00.000-07:00

Wow! The time is still just flying by here, and I feel like I am filling every possible second with something! There is so much I want to do, but with the busy eight week term that Oxford has, I am quickly realizing that I will just need to start saving up money for another trip to Europe!

This week, as the second week of tutorials is proving to be my first real challenge. Earlier today I submitted my first paper (it was on Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility) for my primary tutorial to my tutor. I spent Wednesday through Saturday reading the book, and then Saturday through today writing the paper. It felt good to get the first one under my belt!

The bad news is, paper number two, which is on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, is due (technically) tomorrow night! I didn’t get a chance to start the reading for this tute until yesterday and today, as it wasn’t assigned to me until Saturday afternoon! Needless to say, I have not yet started this paper, and I am a little anxious about getting it done! Although, my tutors are both very reasonable and so my tutor understood that the assignment was late in coming and I may need the extra night!

Outside the front of the Bodleian.

I did get to do some work this past week in the Bodleian, Oxford University’s library which basically has every book ever published. I had to call up a book from the stacks for reading, which means that someone went down into the tunnels full of books below the streets of Oxford to fetch the book for me! It was definitely an experience just finding my way around the Bod (short for Bodleian) and learning how the system works! It was suggested to me by a Stonehill friend to do work in the Radcliffe Camera, so I sat there to read the book I called up. It’s frustrating to get the books I want sometimes because so many other students are taking out the same books I want from my college library and the English Faculty Library, and then the Bod isn’t a lending library. Here are two pictures of the Bod, I am hoping to get a chance to take some better ones soon!

Besides doing work I obviously want to soak up everything else that Oxford has to offer! So I decided to try my hand at rowing. It’s really challenging! Last weekend we had a meeting about the basics of rowing at the Worcester Boat House and also grilled up some hamburgers. It was a beautiful day, and it was so lovely to be along the Isis (which is what the part of the Thames that runs through Oxford is called). This week we had a “tank session,” which means we went to the university gym and learned the technique while sitting in a concrete “boat” in the middle of the pool and rowing with oars with holes in them. This weekend was our first outing on the river, and it was pretty stressful! While they have been teaching us the things we need to know step by step, I didn’t yet know all the terminology that the cox called out! So I was so confused about when I was supposed to row! Then my technique in mastering the legs, body, arms, then arms, body, legs movement with each row is not very good…so I was finding it difficult to keep the rhythm with the rest of my boat. Anyway, besides the fact that I need some practice, it was really fun to row and be on the River! Here are a couple pictures from the roof of Worcester’s Boat House:

Some of the more experienced Worcester boys getting ready for an outing.

This weekend was also Matriculation, which is the ceremony that all the first year students who are here for their whole time (sadly it doesn’t include us visiting students) go through to enter into University. From what my friends were telling me, the ceremony is pretty short, they say some things in Latin, and then you are officially a student at Oxford! I didn’t get a chance to get any pictures, so I am going to steal one from some friends to show you. They all have to dress in “subfusc,” which is the black bottoms, white top, black ribbon for girls, white bow tie for boys, and their academic gowns. These gowns are what I also have to wear when I go to formal hall for dinner. There are larger and fancier gowns that you get once you become a scholar, if you do really well in your studies. So if you aren’t thinking Harry Potter yet, start thinking it! Also, they have to carry their mortar boards with them, but not wear them, because if they wear them before graduating they will be fined!

Well, that was a long study break for me, and now I should get back to reading Shakespeare!

Cheers!

OMG! I Can't Believe I'm at Oxford!

2008-10-13T07:59:00.000-07:00

YAY! We’re finally here! After submitting my application a year ago, getting accepted 6 months ago, planning all summer, packing for the past month, spending the weekend in London, and one of the most nervous bus rides of my life, I cannot believe that I am finally here to study for a couple months! Worcester College is absolutely beautiful! As soon as pushed though through the antique, large wooden doors, dragging my two suitcases and backpack, I was stunned to walk into a stone arch entryway and overlook the luscious green grass surrounded by the prettiest old ivy-covered buildings on each side. This Main Quad is a lot smaller than the one we have at Stonehill and you aren’t allowed to walk on it, but I can see why! Throughout this blog post I’ll provide you with pictures of our campus, most of which I took on a sunny, morning stroll the other day.

On Monday, as soon as we arrived, we didn't have much time to do anything or even settle in. I met my tutor for my secondary tutorial, Dr. Elisabeth Dutton, because she is also the director of the JYA Program. The group of 16 of us Americans had lunch with Dr. Dutton before we could drop off our things in our rooms, and immediately after that we rushed along to have tea with Dr. Dutton in her office. She then gave us a quick tour of some important things around the city of Oxford, such as where to go for the best food and coffee, Blackwell’s (a popular bookstore), the Bodleian Library (the main library for all of Oxford, which has tunnels of books underneath the city!), and the ATM and grocery store. The back on campus we had just a bit of time to freshen up before drinks in the room of the JCR President, which is basically like the student body President, yes, he has three rooms that he lives in, just for the purpose of holding such social events! Next we moved along to mingling before dinner, and being served the most fancy dinner I’ve ever had! We had dinner with the Provost, Chaplain, Dean, and a couple other fellows, and the student members of the JCR (Junior Common Room), which is very different than SGA, but would be the equivalent of student government at the Hill. We had a halibut for our appetizer, duck for the main course, and a pudding for desert. They kept refilling our drinks as well, like literally would refill a splash of wine if I took a sip. After dinner, the Provost asked the JCR members to whisk us away to the college bar for some socializing with fellow British students.

During the day on Tuesday, we had lots more informational, orientation type things. I was very pleased to have my first true English afternoon tea at this cute little hotel…they had a fire going and everything! It was quite delicious, and I had a lovely conversation with one of the other JYAs, who incidentally knows someone I know at Stonehill…small world, huh? Tuesday night we got to meet all the freshers (first year students) because they all moved in on Tuesday. It was strange to see them going through exactly what I did two years ago when I was a freshman at Stonehill. They're very nice for the most part, but it is difficult to carry a super long conversation on with all of them right off the bat being American and all. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have an American accent, because I think it would be easier to mingle in and make new friends. After mingling on campus, the JCR had planned an outing to a club in Oxford, so about half of the freshers and of course a lot of the JYAs don't want to miss out on anything, so some of us went along.

The next couple days were similar, as we were doing everything, like charging our meal cards, finding our pigeon-holes (mail-boxes, I swear JK Rowling stole the idea of using owls for mail from Oxford!), and topping up my mobile phone, for the first time. It has been strange at times to try to converse with British students and make new friends. There is a culture gap between us, so at times it is hard to understand what they are talking about, because of their accent and the words they use or loud music in a club, which makes conversation very difficult. But everyone has been really nice, and with time I am sure I will get even closer with some of my new British friends! It has been easier for the Americans to stick together at times, which is ok too though because I’m also making new American friends!

I am studying Women's Literature (specifically Austen and other authors of that time), and Shakespeare (specifically focusing on his comedies). This week is officially Week One of eight. So that's when my first tutorial meeting is. I was really lucky to have my tutor tell me that I do not need to write a paper for our first meeting. I just had to read a novel (Evelina by Frances Burney, which I finished this morning!) and as many secondary sources about that time and the author as I can. Then on Tuesday I will meet with my tutor and talk one on one about it all for an hour. Otherwise, for each other meeting I will be writing about a ten page essay, and that will be the focus of discussion. My tutor for Austen is a visiting lecturer from Stanford University, and although I still have not met her in person, she seems to be very nice, she even asked me to call her Emma rather than Dr. Plaskitt! On Tuesday we are meeting in a coffee shop in Blackwell’s, the bookstore, so it should be a nice relaxed environment in which to discuss the novel. As I mentioned before, one of my tutors is Dr. Dutton, and she is my tutor for Shakespeare, but as it is my secondary I won’t be meeting with her until next week. In addition to the tutorials we can attend lectures by PhDs and Professors (who are actually higher up here in Oxford), which will help us learn more and come up with topics for our papers. Full time students are required to attend these lectures, but visiting students like me can choose to go if we would like to. I actually went to my first one this morning, and it was strange because we don’t have lectures 300 people large at Stonehill! It was about Shakespearean criticism, and I feel it was a little over my head, but its good these are just extras for us!

The work load is going to get very busy very quickly, and it basically already has! But I am trying to balance work with other activities and being able to enjoy the experience of being abroad. So I am also trying rowing. This weekend we had an introduction at Worcester College’s boat house along the Isis (and got bribed with free food!), and then I also began learning how to row in “the tank,” which is an indoor pool with a concrete “boat” in the middle of it meant to learn and practice rowing techniques. I am already quite sore in my legs and abs from holding my “back stop” position! But I don’t think I would’ve had the opportunity to row anywhere else, so this is pretty cool!

Ok, I mentioned it’s going to be a lot of work here, so I really must return to my reading! I will update on my weekly endeavors!

Cheers!

P.S. The food is really yummy, and I have a really really nice room with my own bathroom and everything! Have a look:

A Weekend in London Town

2008-10-13T07:25:00.000-07:00

The past week and a half have been pretty non-stop for me, but I think it is high time that I take a few moments out of my suddenly busy life to update you all! This post will focus on my time in London for my study abroad provider’s Orientation, and the next will fill you in on what my life is like in Oxford!

First of all, my mom wouldn't let me leave home without taking a million pictures to document every moment, so here I am with all my luggage, ready to go! Right about now I was thinking: wait, this weighs as much as me, how am I supposed to carry all this? Anyway, I flew out of Newark, New Jersey last Wednesday night, and I was nervous because I don’t fly much, but I flew with the group flight provided by my study abroad provider so it was really easy! I actually ran into the other student from Stonehill, Alana Landano, going to Worcester with me at the airport, and then also met about 28 other American students going to a couple different colleges at Oxford. So I really wasn’t alone at all! We sat in a big group and chatted, until it was time to board. I somehow ended up with a seat on the plane next to Alana, so it was nice for us to be together (and now she is living on the floor above me, so it is still nice to have someone familiar from home to freak out and complain and stress with!) Anyway, I was in the very middle of the place at the way back, in between Alana and my first British friend, Steve, an older man coming back from visiting family who moved to the US. He was friendly, chatty, and helpful! It was nice. Landing in London, arriving at the hotel and just being there for the first day was so crazy; it was still so surreal to me! It wasn’t until I took a moment to really take in my surroundings that I noticed that cars were being driven on the wrong side of the road! And as silly as this sounds, it was the one thing that made me realize I wasn’t in American anymore! Even now, after being here for a little over a week, it’s the little things that are different that are actually tough to get used to.

For our London Orientation we all stayed in the same hotel and actually had a lot of free time to go exploring! There was one day when we heard from all sorts of people about academics, safety, the political scene in Britain, etc. One night we also got to go to the theater as a group, I can now say I have been to the theater in London! All of that information was really helpful, but I was itching to see some iconic London tourist-y things! My new friends and I were able to set out on our own for the majority of Saturday and Sunday and we went everywhere! We saw: Big Ben, Parliament, the London Eye, walked along the Thames, enjoyed the Tate Modern for a couple hours, the Globe Theater, the London Bridge, the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, and of course the coolest and most expensive department store ever: Harrod’s. The pictures throughout this blog post show all these tourist moments. I also already started on my adventure of trying new things and tried Japanese food and Indian food in one day!

Being in London was really exciting at times, but at others I was feeling pretty homesick. This is especially because with the exception of Alana I was surrounded by completely new people, and in a completely new place. I was also living out of two suitcases in a VERY small hotel room with an even smaller shower. I was getting very, very anxious to get settled in up at Oxford, and I was hoping the accommodations would be nicer and that the water would taste better!

Another difficult part of the London Orientation for me was that I was constantly questioning myself and my intelligence because the group of American students on the program with me are all so intelligent and I feel like they all have had more experience traveling, or living!, in Europe and/or the UK before. This is my first time overseas…EVER! I kept reminding myself though that these are the type of people that I would like to surround myself with, and I learned a lot from being around them for even just a couple days. What is also really cool is that the group of American students was so diverse. There are students who were born in Finland, China, Korea, Georgia the country, and Georgia the state, and they live everywhere from California to Texas to Arkansas and go to colleges such as Vassar, Bowdoin, Wesleyan, Wake Forest, Duke, Brandeis, Harvard, and Carleton. The picture below is of Alana and I and the girls I spent the most time with in London: Maria, Rebecca, and Tiina; with one of the street performers along the Thames.

In the end, I was really glad to have a couple days to overcome jet lag, settle into life in the UK, and just see a lot of the city of London before going up to Oxford. I am planning on going back to London for at least one more weekend organized by my study abroad provider for some more city fun! But at the end of the weekend, I was just really anxious to settle into my room at Oxford and FINALLY get the semester started!

Cheers!

P.S. I have learned that “cheers” can mean hello, goodbye, thank you, or be what you say before a toast, as we would use the term. But there may be more uses out there…

Hello from London!!!

2008-10-04T02:46:00.000-07:00

Cheers!

I am sitting in an internet cafe in London, and just wanted to say a quick hello! Being in London is great so far; we are here for a general Orientation with my study abroad provider before going up to Oxford.. I am still working on getting completely over the jet lag, but it's not as bad as I would have thought. Last night we got to go to the theater, and this afternoon I am going sightseeing with a couple new friends to see all of the iconic London places!

I have to run, but I will write more and add pictures after Monday when I am settled in at Worcester College with my own computer!